You can do a quick search to see the # of open positions at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.
For just Microsoft, the # of open IT & Software engineering positions in the US is in the thousands. Most of them stay open for months.
I've been interviewing software engineers at Microsoft for over a decade. For a given position, I normally talk to around 5-10 folks before we find one we can make an offer to.
You might argue that that's because all the really good people won't talk to us, because we pay so poorly.
I don't think that's true. We pay pretty well, especially for entry level positions. I've interviewed outside the company on a few occasions over my career. For any smaller company, trying to match my existing compensation package is usually a non-starter. I figure that if I lose my job, I'm taking a 50% pay cut to come onboard somewhere else.
Furthermore, as per federal law, the salary range for every open position for which we are entertaining H1-B applicants is posted internally. The idea is that people here on H1-B cannot be left "in the dark" about what "normal" pay is for their job title and level.
So, the bottom line is this: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc all have deep pockets and are competing with each other for labor. Apple and Goog may have been doing their collusion thing but in general, I don't think the problem with Microsoft hiring folks is the money. Often the people we're hiring could get by just fine on less money; what they want is more autonomy or to work on something they perceive to be cooler. Basically, any number of non-compensation related issues.
Despite the outrageous comp packages we offer, there simply aren't enough qualified people applying for positions.
And, by the way, the issue isn't, "we need 15 years of.net experience" or other such requirements. We try as much as possible to hire on aptitude and passion. Unless its a special situation, I don't care what technology people are familiar with when I interview them; I care that they can explain an algorithm to me, and that whatever code or pseudocode they use is plausible (and explainable by them)
Seriously. Finding people who can develop and explain a basic algorithm is difficult. We can't find enough of them.
It isn't a new thing, or even an MS specific thing, btw. When I was interviewing developers at a much, much smaller company, I came across A candidate who didn't know about binary search. She had absolutely no idea where to start.
She had a CS degree.
If you're holding out for great talent, you're competing with a lot of other companies, and all of them have deep pockets. The need is simply greater than the domestic supply.
You can look at the # of American kids going into CS, EE, CompE, etc in American Universities. Then you can look at how many come out.
A quick web search told me: in 2009, the number of CS undergraduates from American universities was 38,000.
Suppose that we want only the top 20% of those graduates -- and that 100% of them are American.
That's 8000 people. Can you see how every company in America chasing after the same 8,000 people may make it difficult to fill positions?
We need more people going into CS (something I'm helping with by volunteering at a local highschool), and we need more of them to be really, really good.
Until then, we're going to try and get the best people we can get from anywhere we can get them.
One other point -- it is horribly expensive to take on foreign workers. There are binders of lawyers at MS that deal with employee visa and immigration problems, on an ongoing basis. We have employees that go on vacation and then can't get back into the US. That's months of lost productivity. Even if someone is here and working, they have all kinds of immigration bullshit to deal with. That's time they're not working, and that's time they're keeping our immigration lawyers busy. It's all a huge tax that domestic workers d
SPARQL appears to be read only, and to be restricted to data in kvp or 3-tuples.
OData supports mutable entities, change and request batching, and http GET semantics for data access. It would appear to map much better to real-world databases and business use-cases.
OData is (now) a standard for how applications can exchange structured data, oriented towards HTTP and statelessness.
OData consumers and producers are language and platform neutral.
In contrast to something like a REST service, for which clients must be specifically authored and the discovery process is done by humans reading an API doc, ODATA specifies a URI convention and a $metadata format that means OData resources are accessed in a uniform way, and that OData endpoints can have their shape/semantics programmatically discovered.
So for instance, if you have entity named Customer hosted on http://foo.com/myOdataFeed, I can issue an HTTP call like this:
furthermore, the metadata document describing your customer type will live at
foo.com/myODataFeed/$metadata... which means I can attach to it with a tool and generate proxy code, if I like. It makes it easy to build a generic OData explorer type tool, or for programs like Excel and BI tools to understand what your data exposes.
Suppose that your Customers have have an integer primary key, (which I discovered from reading $metadata), and have a 1:N association to an ORders entity. I can therefore write this query:
I can add additional operators to the query string, like $filter or $sort, and data-optimization operators like $expand or $select.
OData allows an arbitrary web service to mimic many of the semantics of a real database, in a technology neutral way, and critically, in a way that is uniform for anonymous callers and programmatically rigorous/discoverable.
Places with state-paid or state-assisted university programs tend to have a sieve mechanism (like entrance exams) that sort people into programs of different cost (and life outcomes). E.g. a test determines if you enter vocational school or a university program.
In the US, there is still a test-score aspect of things, but if you pay for it, generally, we let you do whatever you like. That's good, in its own way. Some people are tremendously motivated folks who are bad at taking tests. They ought to be free to choose a difficult path and rise to the occasion.
The problem in the US is the state involvement in financial aid. The policy of "college for everyone" may not make Americans smarter so much as it makes college dumber.
If the state has any interest at all in funding college educations (and this is debatable), presumably, that funding should go to people with insufficient means, better than average motivation and/or talent, and only in subjects for which there is a compelling state interest (I'm looking at you, STEM).
Furthermore, such financing needs to be contingent on them NOT taking a job on wallstreet when they are done. The public already funds those bozos enough; there's no reason to use federal scholarship money as a 4 year long interview for some wallstreet firm. Wallstreet can start doing its own talent recruiting. If those guys are as good as they tell their clients, it should be no problem for them to predict the "winners" and only offer private scholarships accordingly..
What also doesn't make sense is that the government allows anyone with a pulse to borrow 30k/year to go to school for 6 years and maybe get a communications degree.
This is simply not in the public interest, nor is it in the interest of the students, nor is it in the interest of the higher-ed system.
I absolutely agree that there is an education bubble. I think certain people should attend university in certain situations. I went to a small state school with an academic scholarship. I make the same amount of money as people who went to much more expensive places -- without scholarships.
I think University was valuable in my case -- but it was much cheaper back then, and my field has much higher salaries than average.
Diesel-electric hybrids (like how a locomotive works) are actually just starting to show up in heavy equipment like articulated wheel loaders. There are some huge advantages. The electric motors are quieter which means the operators can work closer to existing population and work more hours of the day. The combustion engine only ever runs at peak efficiency to generate electricity. Fuel savings is around 30% compared to mechanical drive. Packaging is much easier due to flexibility of routing cables instead of moving shafts.
An all electric beast is probably a ways off, but a diesel electric hybrid with even a trivial all-electric low speed cruising range before firing up the diesel is probably an interesting possibility.
So, government creates a problem (employer involvement in health insurance), makes it worse (subsidizes employer involvement with health insurance) and then tries to fix it by making it illegal for employers to provide insurance that is too good, and illegal to provide insurance that is too bad, and too expensive to provide any insurance at all, with the predictable effect that lots of employers are simply dropping insurance.
So, it is a fantastic outcome that some peoples insurance situation is being divorced from their employer / employment situation -- this is goodness -- but it is costing people more money, in many cases.
In my case, if I tried to buy health insurance on the BCBS ND exchange, it would be hugely expensive compared to the reduced, employer subsidized coverage I have, and, it would be much worse coverage.
In my state, many more people have lost their existing coverage than have gained coverage due to ACA.
Basically, if the feds hadn't gotten involved in this mess in the first damn place, back during WW2, I think a lot of teeth gnashing could have been avoided.
Instead, the feds are trying to claim a great achievement for maybe partially a little bit addressing a problem that is their own damn fault.
Tufte (and iirc, Feynman) also cited reliance on Powerpoint on the Columbia disaster
I think it's important to understand what powerpoint is good for. It is good for helping an average presenter guide the delivery of low-bandwidth information into a low-attention span audience who are not subject matter experts.
In other words, it's good for 90% of the people, 90% of the time.
If you are trying to send people to space, or create controlled black holes on the European mainland, do not use it.
Another situation where PP can be used effectively is to present visual information - photos, charts, etc.
Ironically enough, I borrowed the Tufte powerpoint rant from the Microsoft Library here at work:)
Ok, so your premise, from one email altercation, is that Theo's attitude is so intense, so "he can never be wrong", that openbsd has no security advantages. Never mind that the premise is ridiculous.
But the actual evidence suggests that internet arguing aside, openbsd eventually adopts valuable security practices and technologies that Theo initially disagrees with.
So, what was the point of your first post, exactly?
Are you going to modify your position on openBSD, now that you know the project incorporates outside feedback, even when they publicly disavow it at first? I mean, you're a rational guy, right?
I look forward to reading a paper from you where you show, factually, that your use of source analysis tools finds vulnerabilities that the OpenBSD team missed.
It should be easy, right?
You'll be a hero. The first person, apparently, to ever look at OpenBSD critically. The first person to test it.
Get over yourself. Accept that they've put out a great product, your butthurt notwithstanding.
You're not the first person to suggest something to Theo, only to have him shoot down your idea.
In my case, I suggested a profiler that you'd run an exe under, and it would catalog the syscalls that the binary made, and all the syscall arguments. That profile would be stored for that program in a repository.
After the profile was created, if the program ever deviated from its syscall profile, the syscalls would fail and the binary would be terminated.
The goal here would be to holistically stop programs from misbehaving when under control of an attacker.
Theo's comment was, basically, "this will never be part of openbsd, and you are perhaps the 10th person to suggest such a thing"
Well, sometime later, something similar to what I suggested did in fact become part of OpenBSD. I think it appeared on Linux first.
Did I begrudge Theo at the time? No. Do I begrudge him now? No.
Even Heroes are fallible people. Theo is just a guy. He's made my life remarkably better because ever since someone remote-rooted my IRIX box, I've had his Operating system as my edge device, and I've not detected any remote-roots ever since. All I did was buy a T-shirt and a couple CDs from him. Hell, I even contributed a fix (Back in the 2.x days).
I think your assessment of OpenBSD's security is shit. Go look at old bugtraq posts. They made a good point of cataloging who was affected. Notably absent was OpenBSD -- almost always. And not because nobody tried -- but because OpenBSD didn't fail.
These guys are serious about security, and the results are self evident. Your personal beef with Theo is your problem; not a reflection of lack of results on their part. The fact that you're editing Wikipedia about this indicates a legendary amount of butt-hurt.
The OpenBSD project has given us lots of goodness, above and beyond OpenBSD itself.
I have no idea why you would question his technical expertise. He has brought up a BSD kernel on countless different pieces of hardware. How many people can say that? How many unix kernel engineers can even say that?
Drowning in a thin-sheet of zero gravity water that slowly crawls over your head and face, that you cannot wipe away because you're wearing a space suit, that you cannot take off, because you are floating in space.
It's like something from fear factor. Imagine getting into a coffin with a window over your face, and you cannot move your arms/legs. And then you realize the coffin is full of tarantulas... because you feel them crawling up your body towards your face....
This guy keeping his cool is an excellent testament to the training they do back on the ground.
Streaming video is easier than downloading large programs
This is false. Another response to yours is worth reading, but I wanted to emphasize this point.
I don't have an expectation that once a program _starts_ downloading at a certain rate, that rate is maintained, _without interruption_, for 90 minutes.
That is precisely the expectation I have for video.
Think about all of the timeouts in the 7 layer OSI model. Can you even enumerate them?
If your goal is to deliver an uninterrupted stream of video, with no hiccups, a lot of things that the internet is designed to do can't actually take place. Say for instance your upstream ISP is multi-homed. Their current route to netflix is over route A. They also have a route B available. Route A dies. Does your movie start going over route B? Do you notice a hiccup while this happens? How long of a hiccup?
If I am building a video player, how much buffer to I put into the player to present the illusion that the stream was never interrupted and that the route change never happened?
Maybe I should blast down bits to you as fast as possible?
But that implies an unlimited buffer on the client device -- which is already a false assumption. And it means that I'm sending bytes that may not be necessary-- users can stop or fast forward playback.
When I was first reading the Stevens Book a long time ago, I was astonished by the UDP protocol. "Why wouldn't people want TCP all the time? It does more stuff for you, and has guaranteed delivery"
In fact, streaming media is precisely one case where udp is commonly used -- perhaps because controlling timeouts, and controlling which data you think is "current", requires more nuance than what TCP provides.
Actually, lets look at one of these in particular.
Let's look at "high crime rate"
Part of our current high crime rate is the rampant usage of illegal drugs in the US.
I think we can agree that there are negative outcomes here. General disregard for the law; some people don't manage their drug habits well; even people who manage their drug consumption well are doing harm to their body.
However, I'm of the opinion that what we do to police drugs is worse than any of the problems of the drug trade.
At this point, I would be willing to accept more drug usage (and some evidence indicate that doesn't actually happen when you decriminalize) because the enforcement of drug laws is so bad for our society.
So, in the case of drug crime -- the poison is better than the cure.
This, in essence, is why I am opposed to net neutrality. I hate comcast. I hate the government more. I can trust comcast to act in their self interest -- which is shaping traffic in a way that generates the least number of angry customers.
Contrastingly, I can't trust the government to do very much right. And I can be assured that whoever will work at the FCC that gets put in charge of policing ISPs will be one of two types of people:
1) won't have any idea how the internet actually works, and won't have any business trying to police practitioners of the evolving art/science of traffic management.
2) will be a former comcast exec, to try and get someone who doesn't suffer from the problems of #1. Of course, this will become yet another revolving door between regulation and industry, where regulation functions to protect incumbent interests
Basically, I look at the speed of innovation on the internet, and I look at the speed (and results) of federal government, and I don't see anyway for the latter to beneficially regulate the former.
As a side note, I do think that ISPs that benefit from locally granted monopoly powers (e.g. telco foo has a service monopoly for neighborhood blah) should come under local regulations in order to retain their legally granted monopoly privilege. And I think industry plays to crush municipal ISP/broadband should not only be laughed out of court, but the instigators of such suits should pay dearly for having brought them.
a post-Scarcity economic environment in the universe of Star Trek is impossible -- especially when you consider TNG and Cmdr Data.
All wealth is the application of human ingenuity to natural resources.
Resources in the universe are already consumed faster than they are produced. The uranium we have now is billions of years old. We have only been using the uranium deposits on Terra for about 70 years.
The hydrocarbon fuels on earth took somewhere between 10e4 and 10e7 years to form. We've depleted a massive amount of this resource in the last 150 years.
The main resource that limits the speed at which we can extract and consume resources to create new wealth is the amount of human labor required to create the wealth.
In other words, if we wanted to, we could mine all of the remaining coal in the world in a short amount of time; limited primarily to how much human labor we could allocate to this task.
Humans continue to improve the speed that some resource can be consumed by building tools, machines, etc, that increase their productivity.
Cmdr Data is, in a sense, the culmination of this effort. He is a synthetic human; more capable than other humans, and with (presumably) the ability to replace himself.
He is the singularity. Once he exists, there is no fundamental limit governing the rate at which the remainder of the universe's resources can be extracted and utilized.
All higher-order matter in the universe, whether it is uranium or hydrocarbons or anything else, represents a chemical battery of the only fundamental energy source -- star radiation.
Post singularity -- when machines can replicate themselves by consuming resources, to build more machines to consume more resources -- it is theoretically possible that all of the star-energy "batteries" (all higher-order matter) will have been consumed. At that point, the agents within the universe will be limited to consuming energy at the rate it is globally emitted by the stars they have access to, less capture efficiency losses.
Human conflict still exists in TNG, and cross-species conflict also exists.
Humans consume resources more quickly than humans or societies that they are in conflict with, to give them an advantage.
The fact that human ships with life support systems exist in the same universe with a super-human artificial intelligence suggest that resource consumption and production are not unlimited. There is still a limiting function.
Thus, resource scarcity still exists. The resource extraction singularity has not come to pass in TNG, despite the many advantages it would bring to those entities that were in conflict with other entities.
It's interesting to me that you lump these two together as if they are close cousins. To me they are opposites: liberty advocate == liberal social conservative == authoritarian As a non-American this confusion seems to me to be behind much of the futility of US political discourse. As with most political confusions there are those who actively promote it.
Ok. Here's what I assert it means in the US.
"Conservative" - someone who has a preference for tradition -- for the aspects of society, culture, and governance that have worked up until now. Wishes to see these establishments continue; sees tampering or tinkering with them as dangerous radicalism unless there is a pressing need. Values equality of opportunity
"liberal" - someone who has no apparently preference for tradition. Agent of social change. Looking to tweak the assumptions and institutions of society. Values equality of outcomes.
Sadly, in the US, both groups are very willing to use authoritarian methods to suppress those they disagree with.
I'm a liberal in the Hayek sense.
It is usually not worthwhile to think about political groupings on a 1 dimensional axis. The Nolan chart and the Pournelle chart are both more interesting and offer greater understanding. For instance, on a Nolan chart I'm a pure libertarian. Though I self-identified earlier as a social conservative, that is not my governing philosophy.
On a Pournelle Chart, I am on the far left ("state as ultimate evil"), but somewhat unsure of where I fall on the y-axis. I find aspects of both Objectivism and classical anarchy desirable and interesting, yet they are at opposite ends of the axis on the Pournelle chart.
Critically, Most liberal politicians are NOT against abortion.
The much discussed GOP "war on women" has abortion rights as a central prong. It wouldn't really reinforce that narrative if the talking points were, "democrats and republicans feel about the same way about abortion", now would it?
Yes, I'm aware of the difference between anecdote and data. Don't be so asinine.
The point here is that people -- especially those who aren't political activists -- often vote by party brand more than by policy positions. I think the original contention was that the republican party primarily has a branding problem -- a well deserved one -- and that the majority of its people and positions aren't intolerably stupid (at least as far as politicians go)
The fact that such an amazingly hyped incumbent like Obama didn't have a much wider victory margin over such an underwhelming disappointment like Romney, should give a sense of how NOT cut and dry the GOP disadvantage is.
The GOP needs to make up some ground, but the problems are entirely of their own making, and solvable by them if they are honest about confronting them.
And, of course, in 30-40 years everyone currently running the GOP will be dead. So, reform will happen one way or another.
It's based on conversations with people that run polls at state fairs, etc.
They run into lots of people that are apolitical, and don't necessary identify with anyone.
Remember, the broad positions of the republican party aren't necessarily what gets the republicans into the headlines.
Your reply is at least as problematic is whatever your issue is with what I wrote. You don't describe what "mainstream" is, and you don't specify what issues you think are GOP issues that are contentious. But if I read between the lines and guess, even your claim is false.
For instance, republicans are lambasted by democrats for being anti-abortion. If you take at face value that republicans are anti-abortion, then it's a simple matter of asking, "ok, is that position against the mainstream" ?
Well, you can decide what the mainstream is, but on that particular issue, here is what one poll found:
The liberal position is often thought to be "abortion anytime, anywhere, any reason, all paid for by others"
There is very little support for that position according to gallup.
The republican position is _advertised_ as being "anyone who ever aborts for any reason should go to jail", but of course that's not the actual position. The republican position can best be described as "there should be some limits on abortion".
And that is the statement overwhelmingly the favorite on the gallup poll I mentioned.
If you write down a list of position statements and don't attach a brand/party to it, and then ask people what they agree/disagree with, republican _positions_ do pretty well.
Independent voters win elections. The politics that win in NYC don't win nationally.
The Republican brand is toxic, because of brand association with people like Akin. And the way you get Akin's and Akin like statements is that when you ask a republican to explain some particular policy/position, they double down with expressing some moral position that seems antiquated at best and offensive more commonly, or they wander off into insanity land.
These things just wreck the brand.
Furthermore, there is a huge struggle for the soul and the future of the republican party. The democrats have huge piles of young energized radicals. The active republicans are almost entirely senior citizens. The young, activist republicans are dominated by Ron Paul supporters -- who are much more socially tolerant than the rank and file, but who want much less government spending than the left can accept.
The party needs to take an active role in managing its brand better. When people like Akin open their mouths, the national party needs to excommunicate them loudly and immediately. "These views are not in keeping with the platforms and goals of the republican party or the republican vision for America". That kind of stuff.
Social conservatives (like myself) need to give up on ever being the majority party again. That ship has sailed. Republicans, liberty advocates, and social conservatives now must settle for the subset of things they want, because getting all of what we want is clearly off the table.
We're still arguing for what the right subset of things to go after is. The Tea Party, to its credit, mostly doesn't do moral/social advocacy or activism, and is mostly about the size of government and adherence to the constitution. That's good stuff.
On economic policy, the modern republican establishment is somewhere between democrat lite and corporo-fascist-enforcers (but, I repeat myself), and purging those elements of the party is going to be painful and take time, and result in lost elections due to infighting. But it has to happen.
I give Rand Paul a lot of credit for taking 80% of what people liked about his dad and making it palatable to 80% of the GOP establishment.
In a modern election, 80% support would be an unheard of landslide. So, say what you will about him, but he's saying the right things about the NSA, about drones, about limits on executive power, and a bunch of other things. He's one of the only republicans that is talking about cutting military spending -- consistently. He's been a huge critic of the TSA from the beginning. He's being wishy-washy on drug policy, but he has said a lot of the right things there as well.
If people could look past the tarnished brand, there's a lot to like about him.
Absent some other factor that is a deal-breaker, I'll support anyone who puts forward legislation to rein in the NSA and to tone down or stop the drug war.
The republicans could adopt these policies, stop talking about gay people and gay marriage, (or better yet, simply say, "we find no provision in the constitution that allows for a federal restriction on same sex marriage. Therefore, in the interest of promoting liberty for all Americans, we support complete government recognition of same sex marriage"), and adopt a "wait and see" approach on Obamacare ("we don't like it, we were against it, but the senate and the executive have rammed it through, so now we're going to focus on other matters while we see how it shakes out").
If they got rid of the things that kill their brand, and focused on the things the democrats aren't touching (drug war, civil liberties, military spending), I think there's some chance.
There is a vibrant, thriving CGM site. (CGM == community generated media).
An entity with money buys the site.
Things stay the same for a while. Invariably, the owning entity wants feature, UI, and usability changes made to their new property.
These changes aren't being made to serve the interests of the existing community.
Here's what happens.
Either, the community dissolves entirely, and something wonderful disappears and dies.
Or, the community mostly moves to a new site, which rallies around what people liked about the old site.
Here is a very specific example. There is a site called "Audiworld". It ran, for a very long time, a funny and antiquated forum software called "KAWF". Audiworld was the top destination on the English speaking internet for Audi enthusiasts. Absolutely excellent technical information about the cars, and many off-topic forums developed to serve the die-hard user community the site had.
Audiworld was bought by InternetBrands and converted to vBulletin. This was against the wishes and strong feedback from most of the cornerstone members of the community.
IB persisted and did the conversion.
Within a week or so, "Quattroworld" showed up as a competitor, and nearly ALL of the technical experts and cornerstone members dumped Audiworld and moved to Quattroworld.
Quattoworld simply chose to keep running the previous forum software.
Look at the information density in the topic listing on the KAWF based forum (the second one). The design is text heavy, information dense, not filled with ads and distractions.
It works on any device; it works on browsers from 10 years ago.
Now look at the vBulletin based forum.
Look at the quality of questions in the vBulletin form.
See any answers?
No, you don't.
Communities are the life of sites like slashdot. You piss off your community at your peril.
We are not interested in suffering so that you can expand your audience. We don't want an expanded audience. The people who should be here are here. The people who haven't found out about here yet will find out, and when they find it, they won't mind the design of the site.
How many other web forums does John Carmack post in? How many other forums get occasional visits from Linux developers? Where else do you see the occasional Microsoft and Apple employee talking about things candidly and without bashing each other?
Stack Exchange has excellent technical content and lots of very bright posters -- but it isn't a social community like this one.
When Classic is retired, and its inevitable replacement has lower information density and makes reading and participating more cumbersome, this community will leave.
Hopefully, it will go somewhere else that runs a fork of the classic code, and life will go on for us, the contributors.
But if not, then it will die entirely. The web will be a worse place; and I will consider myself worse off for the loss.
Your community doesn't need a site redesign. We haven't asked for it. We don't want it. So you're not doing it for us.
If you're not serving us, you've outlived your usefulness.
The internet routes around defects. You'd do well to remember that.
Slashdot Mirror
You can do a quick search to see the # of open positions at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.
For just Microsoft, the # of open IT & Software engineering positions in the US is in the thousands. Most of them stay open for months.
I've been interviewing software engineers at Microsoft for over a decade. For a given position, I normally talk to around 5-10 folks before we find one we can make an offer to.
You might argue that that's because all the really good people won't talk to us, because we pay so poorly.
I don't think that's true. We pay pretty well, especially for entry level positions. I've interviewed outside the company on a few occasions over my career. For any smaller company, trying to match my existing compensation package is usually a non-starter. I figure that if I lose my job, I'm taking a 50% pay cut to come onboard somewhere else.
Furthermore, as per federal law, the salary range for every open position for which we are entertaining H1-B applicants is posted internally. The idea is that people here on H1-B cannot be left "in the dark" about what "normal" pay is for their job title and level.
So, the bottom line is this: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc all have deep pockets and are competing with each other for labor. Apple and Goog may have been doing their collusion thing but in general, I don't think the problem with Microsoft hiring folks is the money. Often the people we're hiring could get by just fine on less money; what they want is more autonomy or to work on something they perceive to be cooler. Basically, any number of non-compensation related issues.
Despite the outrageous comp packages we offer, there simply aren't enough qualified people applying for positions.
And, by the way, the issue isn't, "we need 15 years of .net experience" or other such requirements. We try as much as possible to hire on aptitude and passion. Unless its a special situation, I don't care what technology people are familiar with when I interview them; I care that they can explain an algorithm to me, and that whatever code or pseudocode they use is plausible (and explainable by them)
Seriously. Finding people who can develop and explain a basic algorithm is difficult. We can't find enough of them.
It isn't a new thing, or even an MS specific thing, btw. When I was interviewing developers at a much, much smaller company, I came across A candidate who didn't know about binary search. She had absolutely no idea where to start.
She had a CS degree.
If you're holding out for great talent, you're competing with a lot of other companies, and all of them have deep pockets. The need is simply greater than the domestic supply.
You can look at the # of American kids going into CS, EE, CompE, etc in American Universities. Then you can look at how many come out.
A quick web search told me: in 2009, the number of CS undergraduates from American universities was 38,000.
Suppose that we want only the top 20% of those graduates -- and that 100% of them are American.
That's 8000 people. Can you see how every company in America chasing after the same 8,000 people may make it difficult to fill positions?
We need more people going into CS (something I'm helping with by volunteering at a local highschool), and we need more of them to be really, really good.
Until then, we're going to try and get the best people we can get from anywhere we can get them.
One other point -- it is horribly expensive to take on foreign workers. There are binders of lawyers at MS that deal with employee visa and immigration problems, on an ongoing basis. We have employees that go on vacation and then can't get back into the US. That's months of lost productivity. Even if someone is here and working, they have all kinds of immigration bullshit to deal with. That's time they're not working, and that's time they're keeping our immigration lawyers busy. It's all a huge tax that domestic workers d
I suggest you look at the $metadata document for the service I linked to.
The property names, conceptual storage types, relationship info, etc, is all in there.
I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve, exactly.
You could be right.
OData predates SPARQL 1.1, however, and supported all CRUD operations from its inception.
SPARQL appears to be read only, and to be restricted to data in kvp or 3-tuples.
OData supports mutable entities, change and request batching, and http GET semantics for data access. It would appear to map much better to real-world databases and business use-cases.
OData is (now) a standard for how applications can exchange structured data, oriented towards HTTP and statelessness.
OData consumers and producers are language and platform neutral.
In contrast to something like a REST service, for which clients must be specifically authored and the discovery process is done by humans reading an API doc, ODATA specifies a URI convention and a $metadata format that means OData resources are accessed in a uniform way, and that OData endpoints can have their shape/semantics programmatically discovered.
So for instance, if you have entity named Customer hosted on http://foo.com/myOdataFeed, I can issue an HTTP call like this:
GET http://foo.com/myODataFeed/Cus...
and get your customers.
furthermore, the metadata document describing your customer type will live at
foo.com/myODataFeed/$metadata ... which means I can attach to it with a tool and generate proxy code, if I like. It makes it easy to build a generic OData explorer type tool, or for programs like Excel and BI tools to understand what your data exposes.
Suppose that your Customers have have an integer primary key, (which I discovered from reading $metadata), and have a 1:N association to an ORders entity. I can therefore write this query:
GET http://foo.com/myODataFeed/Cus... .. and get back the Orders for just customer ID:1
I can add additional operators to the query string, like $filter or $sort, and data-optimization operators like $expand or $select.
OData allows an arbitrary web service to mimic many of the semantics of a real database, in a technology neutral way, and critically, in a way that is uniform for anonymous callers and programmatically rigorous/discoverable.
Examples of OData v3 content are available here:
http://services.odata.org/V3/N...
OData V4 is a breaking protocol change from V3 and prior versions, but has been accepted as a standard
And, shameless plug: If you want to consume and build OData V1/V2/V3 services easily, check out Visual Studio LightSwitch :)
Places with state-paid or state-assisted university programs tend to have a sieve mechanism (like entrance exams) that sort people into programs of different cost (and life outcomes). E.g. a test determines if you enter vocational school or a university program.
In the US, there is still a test-score aspect of things, but if you pay for it, generally, we let you do whatever you like. That's good, in its own way. Some people are tremendously motivated folks who are bad at taking tests. They ought to be free to choose a difficult path and rise to the occasion.
The problem in the US is the state involvement in financial aid. The policy of "college for everyone" may not make Americans smarter so much as it makes college dumber.
If the state has any interest at all in funding college educations (and this is debatable), presumably, that funding should go to people with insufficient means, better than average motivation and/or talent, and only in subjects for which there is a compelling state interest (I'm looking at you, STEM).
Furthermore, such financing needs to be contingent on them NOT taking a job on wallstreet when they are done. The public already funds those bozos enough; there's no reason to use federal scholarship money as a 4 year long interview for some wallstreet firm. Wallstreet can start doing its own talent recruiting. If those guys are as good as they tell their clients, it should be no problem for them to predict the "winners" and only offer private scholarships accordingly..
What also doesn't make sense is that the government allows anyone with a pulse to borrow 30k/year to go to school for 6 years and maybe get a communications degree.
This is simply not in the public interest, nor is it in the interest of the students, nor is it in the interest of the higher-ed system.
I absolutely agree that there is an education bubble. I think certain people should attend university in certain situations. I went to a small state school with an academic scholarship. I make the same amount of money as people who went to much more expensive places -- without scholarships.
I think University was valuable in my case -- but it was much cheaper back then, and my field has much higher salaries than average.
Diesel-electric hybrids (like how a locomotive works) are actually just starting to show up in heavy equipment like articulated wheel loaders. There are some huge advantages. The electric motors are quieter which means the operators can work closer to existing population and work more hours of the day. The combustion engine only ever runs at peak efficiency to generate electricity. Fuel savings is around 30% compared to mechanical drive. Packaging is much easier due to flexibility of routing cables instead of moving shafts.
An all electric beast is probably a ways off, but a diesel electric hybrid with even a trivial all-electric low speed cruising range before firing up the diesel is probably an interesting possibility.
So, government creates a problem (employer involvement in health insurance), makes it worse (subsidizes employer involvement with health insurance) and then tries to fix it by making it illegal for employers to provide insurance that is too good, and illegal to provide insurance that is too bad, and too expensive to provide any insurance at all, with the predictable effect that lots of employers are simply dropping insurance.
So, it is a fantastic outcome that some peoples insurance situation is being divorced from their employer / employment situation -- this is goodness -- but it is costing people more money, in many cases.
In my case, if I tried to buy health insurance on the BCBS ND exchange, it would be hugely expensive compared to the reduced, employer subsidized coverage I have, and, it would be much worse coverage.
In my state, many more people have lost their existing coverage than have gained coverage due to ACA.
Basically, if the feds hadn't gotten involved in this mess in the first damn place, back during WW2, I think a lot of teeth gnashing could have been avoided.
Instead, the feds are trying to claim a great achievement for maybe partially a little bit addressing a problem that is their own damn fault.
If the point is to look for pathogens in other peoples fluids...
well, I'm not real excited about holding the thing mm from my eye :)
(somehow having a giant metal/glass column as a buffer seems less creepy)
haha.
Oops :)
Ok, Feynman ridiculed NASA about the _other_ shuttle disaster :)
My apologies :)
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tuf...
I've read the booklet and I found it persuasive.
Tufte (and iirc, Feynman) also cited reliance on Powerpoint on the Columbia disaster
I think it's important to understand what powerpoint is good for. It is good for helping an average presenter guide the delivery of low-bandwidth information into a low-attention span audience who are not subject matter experts.
In other words, it's good for 90% of the people, 90% of the time.
If you are trying to send people to space, or create controlled black holes on the European mainland, do not use it.
Another situation where PP can be used effectively is to present visual information - photos, charts, etc.
Ironically enough, I borrowed the Tufte powerpoint rant from the Microsoft Library here at work :)
Ok, so your premise, from one email altercation, is that Theo's attitude is so intense, so "he can never be wrong", that openbsd has no security advantages. Never mind that the premise is ridiculous.
But the actual evidence suggests that internet arguing aside, openbsd eventually adopts valuable security practices and technologies that Theo initially disagrees with.
So, what was the point of your first post, exactly?
Are you going to modify your position on openBSD, now that you know the project incorporates outside feedback, even when they publicly disavow it at first? I mean, you're a rational guy, right?
I look forward to reading a paper from you where you show, factually, that your use of source analysis tools finds vulnerabilities that the OpenBSD team missed.
It should be easy, right?
You'll be a hero. The first person, apparently, to ever look at OpenBSD critically. The first person to test it.
Get over yourself. Accept that they've put out a great product, your butthurt notwithstanding.
You're not the first person to suggest something to Theo, only to have him shoot down your idea.
In my case, I suggested a profiler that you'd run an exe under, and it would catalog the syscalls that the binary made, and all the syscall arguments. That profile would be stored for that program in a repository.
After the profile was created, if the program ever deviated from its syscall profile, the syscalls would fail and the binary would be terminated.
The goal here would be to holistically stop programs from misbehaving when under control of an attacker.
Theo's comment was, basically, "this will never be part of openbsd, and you are perhaps the 10th person to suggest such a thing"
Well, sometime later, something similar to what I suggested did in fact become part of OpenBSD. I think it appeared on Linux first.
Did I begrudge Theo at the time? No. Do I begrudge him now? No.
Even Heroes are fallible people. Theo is just a guy. He's made my life remarkably better because ever since someone remote-rooted my IRIX box, I've had his Operating system as my edge device, and I've not detected any remote-roots ever since. All I did was buy a T-shirt and a couple CDs from him. Hell, I even contributed a fix (Back in the 2.x days).
I think your assessment of OpenBSD's security is shit. Go look at old bugtraq posts. They made a good point of cataloging who was affected. Notably absent was OpenBSD -- almost always. And not because nobody tried -- but because OpenBSD didn't fail.
These guys are serious about security, and the results are self evident. Your personal beef with Theo is your problem; not a reflection of lack of results on their part. The fact that you're editing Wikipedia about this indicates a legendary amount of butt-hurt.
The OpenBSD project has given us lots of goodness, above and beyond OpenBSD itself.
I have no idea why you would question his technical expertise. He has brought up a BSD kernel on countless different pieces of hardware. How many people can say that? How many unix kernel engineers can even say that?
There's a new one for your nightmares.
Drowning in a thin-sheet of zero gravity water that slowly crawls over your head and face, that you cannot wipe away because you're wearing a space suit, that you cannot take off, because you are floating in space.
It's like something from fear factor. Imagine getting into a coffin with a window over your face, and you cannot move your arms/legs. And then you realize the coffin is full of tarantulas... because you feel them crawling up your body towards your face....
This guy keeping his cool is an excellent testament to the training they do back on the ground.
Reminds me of this article:
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
The original Kinect hardware was one of the fastest selling consumer electronics devices in history.
http://www.1up.com/news/kinect...
That was when it was an optional add-on.
My kids play X360 games via connect exclusively.
I mostly play FM4 on the 360, with a racing wheel. In fact, the only time a controller gets used is to navigate DVD menus.
The Standard Oil monopoly came about largely due to the efficiencies of Standard Oil.
Monopolies are probably not a natural result, but an exceptional case when some business leaders are just tremendously successful.
A monopoly, in and of itself, is not a bad thing nor harmful to consumers.
A monopoly being leveraged to over-charge its customers is bad. But is this situation sustainable?
Suppose that standard Oil had a 50% margin on its business.
Certainly someone else could have come along, operated on a 20% margin, and taken market share from Standard Oil.
This will happen in a free market.
It won't happen when Standard Oil is legally protected from competition.
In a free market, monopolies can happen, but they will not maintain predatory behavior unless they are legally protected.
You can read "Capitalism: The unknown ideal" for a longer explanation.
This is false. Another response to yours is worth reading, but I wanted to emphasize this point.
I don't have an expectation that once a program _starts_ downloading at a certain rate, that rate is maintained, _without interruption_, for 90 minutes.
That is precisely the expectation I have for video.
Think about all of the timeouts in the 7 layer OSI model. Can you even enumerate them?
If your goal is to deliver an uninterrupted stream of video, with no hiccups, a lot of things that the internet is designed to do can't actually take place. Say for instance your upstream ISP is multi-homed. Their current route to netflix is over route A. They also have a route B available. Route A dies. Does your movie start going over route B? Do you notice a hiccup while this happens? How long of a hiccup?
If I am building a video player, how much buffer to I put into the player to present the illusion that the stream was never interrupted and that the route change never happened?
Maybe I should blast down bits to you as fast as possible?
But that implies an unlimited buffer on the client device -- which is already a false assumption. And it means that I'm sending bytes that may not be necessary-- users can stop or fast forward playback.
When I was first reading the Stevens Book a long time ago, I was astonished by the UDP protocol. "Why wouldn't people want TCP all the time? It does more stuff for you, and has guaranteed delivery"
In fact, streaming media is precisely one case where udp is commonly used -- perhaps because controlling timeouts, and controlling which data you think is "current", requires more nuance than what TCP provides.
Actually, lets look at one of these in particular.
Let's look at "high crime rate"
Part of our current high crime rate is the rampant usage of illegal drugs in the US.
I think we can agree that there are negative outcomes here. General disregard for the law; some people don't manage their drug habits well; even people who manage their drug consumption well are doing harm to their body.
However, I'm of the opinion that what we do to police drugs is worse than any of the problems of the drug trade.
At this point, I would be willing to accept more drug usage (and some evidence indicate that doesn't actually happen when you decriminalize) because the enforcement of drug laws is so bad for our society.
So, in the case of drug crime -- the poison is better than the cure.
This, in essence, is why I am opposed to net neutrality. I hate comcast. I hate the government more. I can trust comcast to act in their self interest -- which is shaping traffic in a way that generates the least number of angry customers.
Contrastingly, I can't trust the government to do very much right. And I can be assured that whoever will work at the FCC that gets put in charge of policing ISPs will be one of two types of people:
1) won't have any idea how the internet actually works, and won't have any business trying to police practitioners of the evolving art/science of traffic management.
2) will be a former comcast exec, to try and get someone who doesn't suffer from the problems of #1. Of course, this will become yet another revolving door between regulation and industry, where regulation functions to protect incumbent interests
Basically, I look at the speed of innovation on the internet, and I look at the speed (and results) of federal government, and I don't see anyway for the latter to beneficially regulate the former.
As a side note, I do think that ISPs that benefit from locally granted monopoly powers (e.g. telco foo has a service monopoly for neighborhood blah) should come under local regulations in order to retain their legally granted monopoly privilege. And I think industry plays to crush municipal ISP/broadband should not only be laughed out of court, but the instigators of such suits should pay dearly for having brought them.
a post-Scarcity economic environment in the universe of Star Trek is impossible -- especially when you consider TNG and Cmdr Data.
All wealth is the application of human ingenuity to natural resources.
Resources in the universe are already consumed faster than they are produced. The uranium we have now is billions of years old. We have only been using the uranium deposits on Terra for about 70 years.
The hydrocarbon fuels on earth took somewhere between 10e4 and 10e7 years to form. We've depleted a massive amount of this resource in the last 150 years.
The main resource that limits the speed at which we can extract and consume resources to create new wealth is the amount of human labor required to create the wealth.
In other words, if we wanted to, we could mine all of the remaining coal in the world in a short amount of time; limited primarily to how much human labor we could allocate to this task.
Humans continue to improve the speed that some resource can be consumed by building tools, machines, etc, that increase their productivity.
Cmdr Data is, in a sense, the culmination of this effort. He is a synthetic human; more capable than other humans, and with (presumably) the ability to replace himself.
He is the singularity. Once he exists, there is no fundamental limit governing the rate at which the remainder of the universe's resources can be extracted and utilized.
All higher-order matter in the universe, whether it is uranium or hydrocarbons or anything else, represents a chemical battery of the only fundamental energy source -- star radiation.
Post singularity -- when machines can replicate themselves by consuming resources, to build more machines to consume more resources -- it is theoretically possible that all of the star-energy "batteries" (all higher-order matter) will have been consumed. At that point, the agents within the universe will be limited to consuming energy at the rate it is globally emitted by the stars they have access to, less capture efficiency losses.
Human conflict still exists in TNG, and cross-species conflict also exists.
Humans consume resources more quickly than humans or societies that they are in conflict with, to give them an advantage.
The fact that human ships with life support systems exist in the same universe with a super-human artificial intelligence suggest that resource consumption and production are not unlimited. There is still a limiting function.
Thus, resource scarcity still exists. The resource extraction singularity has not come to pass in TNG, despite the many advantages it would bring to those entities that were in conflict with other entities.
Ok. Here's what I assert it means in the US.
"Conservative" - someone who has a preference for tradition -- for the aspects of society, culture, and governance that have worked up until now. Wishes to see these establishments continue; sees tampering or tinkering with them as dangerous radicalism unless there is a pressing need. Values equality of opportunity
"liberal" - someone who has no apparently preference for tradition. Agent of social change. Looking to tweak the assumptions and institutions of society. Values equality of outcomes.
Sadly, in the US, both groups are very willing to use authoritarian methods to suppress those they disagree with.
I'm a liberal in the Hayek sense.
It is usually not worthwhile to think about political groupings on a 1 dimensional axis. The Nolan chart and the Pournelle chart are both more interesting and offer greater understanding. For instance, on a Nolan chart I'm a pure libertarian. Though I self-identified earlier as a social conservative, that is not my governing philosophy.
On a Pournelle Chart, I am on the far left ("state as ultimate evil"), but somewhat unsure of where I fall on the y-axis. I find aspects of both Objectivism and classical anarchy desirable and interesting, yet they are at opposite ends of the axis on the Pournelle chart.
Critically, Most liberal politicians are NOT against abortion.
The much discussed GOP "war on women" has abortion rights as a central prong. It wouldn't really reinforce that narrative if the talking points were, "democrats and republicans feel about the same way about abortion", now would it?
Yes, I'm aware of the difference between anecdote and data. Don't be so asinine.
The point here is that people -- especially those who aren't political activists -- often vote by party brand more than by policy positions. I think the original contention was that the republican party primarily has a branding problem -- a well deserved one -- and that the majority of its people and positions aren't intolerably stupid (at least as far as politicians go)
The fact that such an amazingly hyped incumbent like Obama didn't have a much wider victory margin over such an underwhelming disappointment like Romney, should give a sense of how NOT cut and dry the GOP disadvantage is.
The GOP needs to make up some ground, but the problems are entirely of their own making, and solvable by them if they are honest about confronting them.
And, of course, in 30-40 years everyone currently running the GOP will be dead. So, reform will happen one way or another.
It's based on conversations with people that run polls at state fairs, etc.
They run into lots of people that are apolitical, and don't necessary identify with anyone.
Remember, the broad positions of the republican party aren't necessarily what gets the republicans into the headlines.
Your reply is at least as problematic is whatever your issue is with what I wrote. You don't describe what "mainstream" is, and you don't specify what issues you think are GOP issues that are contentious. But if I read between the lines and guess, even your claim is false.
For instance, republicans are lambasted by democrats for being anti-abortion. If you take at face value that republicans are anti-abortion, then it's a simple matter of asking, "ok, is that position against the mainstream" ?
Well, you can decide what the mainstream is, but on that particular issue, here is what one poll found:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/157...
The liberal position is often thought to be "abortion anytime, anywhere, any reason, all paid for by others"
There is very little support for that position according to gallup.
The republican position is _advertised_ as being "anyone who ever aborts for any reason should go to jail", but of course that's not the actual position. The republican position can best be described as "there should be some limits on abortion".
And that is the statement overwhelmingly the favorite on the gallup poll I mentioned.
If you write down a list of position statements and don't attach a brand/party to it, and then ask people what they agree/disagree with, republican _positions_ do pretty well.
Independent voters win elections. The politics that win in NYC don't win nationally.
The Republican brand is toxic, because of brand association with people like Akin. And the way you get Akin's and Akin like statements is that when you ask a republican to explain some particular policy/position, they double down with expressing some moral position that seems antiquated at best and offensive more commonly, or they wander off into insanity land.
These things just wreck the brand.
Furthermore, there is a huge struggle for the soul and the future of the republican party. The democrats have huge piles of young energized radicals. The active republicans are almost entirely senior citizens. The young, activist republicans are dominated by Ron Paul supporters -- who are much more socially tolerant than the rank and file, but who want much less government spending than the left can accept.
The party needs to take an active role in managing its brand better. When people like Akin open their mouths, the national party needs to excommunicate them loudly and immediately. "These views are not in keeping with the platforms and goals of the republican party or the republican vision for America". That kind of stuff.
Social conservatives (like myself) need to give up on ever being the majority party again. That ship has sailed. Republicans, liberty advocates, and social conservatives now must settle for the subset of things they want, because getting all of what we want is clearly off the table.
We're still arguing for what the right subset of things to go after is. The Tea Party, to its credit, mostly doesn't do moral/social advocacy or activism, and is mostly about the size of government and adherence to the constitution. That's good stuff.
On economic policy, the modern republican establishment is somewhere between democrat lite and corporo-fascist-enforcers (but, I repeat myself), and purging those elements of the party is going to be painful and take time, and result in lost elections due to infighting. But it has to happen.
I give Rand Paul a lot of credit for taking 80% of what people liked about his dad and making it palatable to 80% of the GOP establishment.
In a modern election, 80% support would be an unheard of landslide. So, say what you will about him, but he's saying the right things about the NSA, about drones, about limits on executive power, and a bunch of other things. He's one of the only republicans that is talking about cutting military spending -- consistently. He's been a huge critic of the TSA from the beginning. He's being wishy-washy on drug policy, but he has said a lot of the right things there as well.
If people could look past the tarnished brand, there's a lot to like about him.
Absent some other factor that is a deal-breaker, I'll support anyone who puts forward legislation to rein in the NSA and to tone down or stop the drug war.
The republicans could adopt these policies, stop talking about gay people and gay marriage, (or better yet, simply say, "we find no provision in the constitution that allows for a federal restriction on same sex marriage. Therefore, in the interest of promoting liberty for all Americans, we support complete government recognition of same sex marriage"), and adopt a "wait and see" approach on Obamacare ("we don't like it, we were against it, but the senate and the executive have rammed it through, so now we're going to focus on other matters while we see how it shakes out").
If they got rid of the things that kill their brand, and focused on the things the democrats aren't touching (drug war, civil liberties, military spending), I think there's some chance.
We have seen this before.
There is a vibrant, thriving CGM site. (CGM == community generated media).
An entity with money buys the site.
Things stay the same for a while. Invariably, the owning entity wants feature, UI, and usability changes made to their new property.
These changes aren't being made to serve the interests of the existing community.
Here's what happens.
Either, the community dissolves entirely, and something wonderful disappears and dies.
Or, the community mostly moves to a new site, which rallies around what people liked about the old site.
Here is a very specific example. There is a site called "Audiworld". It ran, for a very long time, a funny and antiquated forum software called "KAWF". Audiworld was the top destination on the English speaking internet for Audi enthusiasts. Absolutely excellent technical information about the cars, and many off-topic forums developed to serve the die-hard user community the site had.
Audiworld was bought by InternetBrands and converted to vBulletin. This was against the wishes and strong feedback from most of the cornerstone members of the community.
IB persisted and did the conversion.
Within a week or so, "Quattroworld" showed up as a competitor, and nearly ALL of the technical experts and cornerstone members dumped Audiworld and moved to Quattroworld.
Quattoworld simply chose to keep running the previous forum software.
Compare the two sites now:
The "converted" forum:
http://forums.audiworld.com/fo...
The rebellion forum:
http://forums.quattroworld.com...
Look at the information density in the topic listing on the KAWF based forum (the second one). The design is text heavy, information dense, not filled with ads and distractions.
It works on any device; it works on browsers from 10 years ago.
Now look at the vBulletin based forum.
Look at the quality of questions in the vBulletin form.
See any answers?
No, you don't.
Communities are the life of sites like slashdot. You piss off your community at your peril.
We are not interested in suffering so that you can expand your audience. We don't want an expanded audience. The people who should be here are here. The people who haven't found out about here yet will find out, and when they find it, they won't mind the design of the site.
How many other web forums does John Carmack post in? How many other forums get occasional visits from Linux developers? Where else do you see the occasional Microsoft and Apple employee talking about things candidly and without bashing each other?
Stack Exchange has excellent technical content and lots of very bright posters -- but it isn't a social community like this one.
When Classic is retired, and its inevitable replacement has lower information density and makes reading and participating more cumbersome, this community will leave.
Hopefully, it will go somewhere else that runs a fork of the classic code, and life will go on for us, the contributors.
But if not, then it will die entirely. The web will be a worse place; and I will consider myself worse off for the loss.
Your community doesn't need a site redesign. We haven't asked for it. We don't want it. So you're not doing it for us.
If you're not serving us, you've outlived your usefulness.
The internet routes around defects. You'd do well to remember that.