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Comment applied mathmatics (Score 1) 372

Seriously, if you love programming, after you have your undergraduate degree in computer science, go for a masters in applied mathematics. This will position you to do the really interesting stuff in programming -- breaking new ground working with smart folks. A masters in computer science should only be held by PhD candidates who failed their comprehensives. And the MBA/business track stuff is great, if you want to manage people and money, not program. But, if you want to keep your hands on the keyboard, and your head in the interesting computing challenges, get better at math. QED.

P.S. And if you turn out to be good at managing people, you can do that, too, down the road.

Comment absurd (Score 2, Insightful) 379

This is silly. The URLs, even "long" ones are miniscule compared to the pictures, streaming video, music, javascript etc. on these pages. To worry about them is like worrying about the lint on a suit of clothes making them too hot. This is just absurd.

Comment Re:Is there a gas leak in here? (Score 1) 1147

I wouldn't take Vista for free but I happily paid a $500 'logo tax'

Why can't people just prefer apple, and not be fanatical about it? Oh, right, because then that wouldn't justify the increased expense.

Personally I like the hardware and design of the MacBook Pro, the software is nice too, but for me it's not worth the extra coin.

I use a mac because logic pro is the software I want to use, and that is where it runs. And my mac pro really was competitively priced, relative to similar desktops from others. And I do prefer OS X, but that might just be what I am used to. Oh, and it is nice to find unix underneath when I have to do something hard, since I know unix. *Shrug* I guess that makes me a fanatic in some peoples' eyes.

Comment Re:Were nerds here... use the f'ing metric system (Score 2, Informative) 472

The zero of Fahrenheit -- the freezing point of saturated brine -- is no less sensible than the Celcius zero of the freezing point of water. Fahrenheit is also more precise with fewer digits in the ranges most people deal with day to day.

Yeah, because I'm always having to deal with saturated brine. I can't tell you how many times I've gone out driving in sub-zero temperatures and nearly skidded on all that saturated brine ice.

It was developed in a port city where knowing if the harbor was frozen over (or not) was in fact of great importance.

Comment Brilliant is good, quirky is fine, obnoxious not (Score 1) 1134

It is certainly true that there are super-programmers out there. They are worth not just two or three of the rest of us, but more productive than 100 or so normal humans. A company is really lucky to have some of them.

The thing is, there is zero correlation between being this good, and being an asshat.

Now, sometimes there will be a bad programmer who acts like this, and they just get fired fast. Nobody worries about them.

But when the stars mis-align and you get someone actually talented, who is also a jerk, some inexperienced managers will feel stress about the obvious decision.

But the easy, obvious decision is to fire the asshat. You can go out there and find someone just as talented who is not obnoxious. I promise, you can. Do it.

The rest of the team will have a party when the obnoxious one leaves. Overall morale will increase, people will be only too glad to jump in and fill the gap (until you replace him/her and the replacement comes up to speed). Everyone will respect management more, and they will see that treating coworkers with respect is really important, not just lip service.

By the way, the same holds true for the great salesperson, etc.

Comment Electronic warfare in the Army was ok (Score 1) 426

When I was in the Army, doing electronic warfare stuff (which is the clear antecedent of cyber warefare), we were treated like sort of semi-soldiers, but well enough for all of that.

I think that the complaint in the article is that officers were feeling like they couldn't advance their careers without doing something actually militaryish. I have limited insight into this, as I was enlisted, but I do know that the Army just created a new career path for EW officers, and they created and EW command a few years ago.

But it might well be hard for officers to grow into positions of general responsibility for military activities, if they only have experience of one narrow specialty, which is indeed pretty different from the mainstream. I am not at all sure that this is a bad thing.

Maybe the roles that were being filled by these junior officers, should have been staffed by warrant officers, who exist exactly to provide technical leadership is specialized roles.

Comment Re:budget? (Score 1) 298

I totally endorse this approach.

The $100 per month is nothing compared to the personnel expense of trying to keep the beast running with local machines and people.

And as for infrastructure for availability, think uninterruptible power, n+1 cooling, connectivity redundancy, physical security and network security, before you ever even think about redundant servers, storage and load-balancing, failover software.

Rackspace is indeed a good choice (and no I don't work for them), and they can offer you HA solutions if you need them and can afford them (a non-profit serving 1000 users a day almost certainly does not need, and can't afford, HA).

I am betting you can live with their very, very good SLAs for just a cheap, standard solution. Add in a RAID array, managed backup and a hardware firewall and you will be golden.

More importantly, do NOT use ftp as you said you plan to in your post. It is totally insecure, and you will very quickly be turned into a distribution center for pornography, stolen software, and instructions to botnets. You can move the files around using HTTP, or SFTP if you must. Don't run FTP.

Rick.

Comment Privacy is already a lost cause (Score 1) 474

Given the massive thefts of data from credit card processors, credit reporting agencies, government agencies etc., any thought that you have any privacy is as silly as belief in the tooth fairy.

Unless you are an off-the-grid cash-economy false-ID type a la Claire Wolf outsider (which you are not given your job), then you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from being on linkedin.

This is not to say you can't shoot yourself in the foot with inappropriate postings on myspace of facebook, but a drooling cretin can tell what should and should not go up there. But linkedin is a resume, letters of recommendation and a way to contact folks with warm introductions. No harm, no foul.

Comment What makes you enjoy each day? (Score 1) 315

Many of the other comments can be summarized as:

* "I am afraid of executives, I don't understand what they do so I assume they are out to screw me." I'll just ignore this one.

* "Get legal advice when dealing with legal documents." This is terribly good advice, you should do so.

* "10% of something big is a lot, 10% of something tiny is not. And stock that can't be sold isn't much use." All true. But it (accepting partial compensation in restricted stock) is certainly a risk that many of us accept, and one which has worked out well (sometimes very well) for many, many people.

The real question to ask yourself, in my opinion, is "do I like coming to work here each day?" If the answer is "no" then leave. If you are worth 10% of your current company, you are worth a comparable amount to someone else -- either in consulting fees or a position elsewhere with equity.

Life is too short to do things that suck. And money is not all that important, as long as you have enough to cover the basics.

Comment Re:That's it? (Score 1) 594

The single back wheel does two things, each important:

1. Reduces weight by quite a lot,

2. Allows the vehicle to count as a motorcycle, and thereby ignore all of the safety standards to which cars must comply. So just don't look at crash test results, if any are every published....you won't like them.

Comment Re:MPG is an obsolete measurement (Score 1) 380

As JFK once put it very succinctly...

"We choose to go to the moon, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard"

If all we ever do is the easy stuff, nothing ever changes.

And for all the people saying this is easy, why don't you give it a try then? It isn't just the money, this stuff takes serious engineering and real talent on the part of the driver/pilot.

What amazing stuff have you done in your life?

Hmmm. I thought the Apollo program was a way to get funding for development of ICBM technology. Perhaps I am just cynical.

Businesses

Dell To Sell Its Computer Factories 249

Anti-Globalism sends us to a Wall Street Journal for a report that Dell plans to sell its factories in an effort to revamp its production model. Quoting: "Dell's plants are still regarded as efficient at churning out desktop PCs. But within the industry, company-owned factories aren't considered the least expensive way to produce laptops, which have been the main driver of growth lately and are complex and labor-intensive to assemble. Rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. years ago shifted to contract manufacturers -- companies that provide production services to others -- to build their portable computers. H-P builds "less than half" of its PCs in facilities it owns, wrote Tony Prophet, H-P's senior vice president for PC supply chain, in an e-mail. Contract manufacturers can generally produce computers more cheaply because their entire operations are narrowly focused on finding efficiencies in manufacturing, as opposed to large firms like Dell, which must also balance marketing and other considerations."

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