glazener - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Fill out a Form? (Score 5, Insightful) 357

by glazener on Saturday November 03, 2007 @04:48PM (#21226117) Attached to: Ten Strangely Cruel Science Experiments

That works right up until you are diagnosed with a potentially expensive medical condition. Not when you have treatment for it mind you but when you are diagnosed. Try getting affordable private health insurance with rheumatoid arthritis. Or having ever had a bout with clinical depression. Or even something like severe excema. Your individual insurance premium for any of those conditions can run into multiple thousands a month, something you very likely won't be able to afford on 32K a year.

None of these are lifestyle diseases, there is nothing you can do to avoid them except be lucky. If you're unlucky, and don't have employeer provided health insurance, you're pretty much screwed.

Submission + - Are Industry Standards really this low?

Submitted by

segafreak

on Monday August 06, 2007 @01:22PM

segafreak writes: "I'm a Software Engineering Student from the UK about to enter my final year. During this summer I have been on placement at a large software company (which shall remain unnamed), and while my experience hasn't been entirely negative, I'm appalled by some of the practises that seem commonplace — minimal or non-existant documentation, prototype quality code being sold to customers, lack of comments in code, and worst of all large projects coded and maintained by a single programmer! Having spoken to several of my classmates, I've discovered the situation to be similar all across the region. So fellow Slashdotters, my question is this: is our Industry really this bad? Or have my classmates and I just been shockingly unlucky?"

Submission + - Students build supercomputers from bits, pieces

Submitted by

spudnic

on Monday August 06, 2007 @01:13PM

spudnic writes: "The LSU Center for Computation and Technology and Chief Scientist Thomas Sterling developed the free summer boot camp as a pilot program to expand statewide as early as next year. "They literally assembled these themselves and loaded the software," said Sterling, pointing to the computer monitors and the stacks of computing nodes on top each other. "They built these from bits and pieces, so it's really hands-on experience." "I can't live in an ivory tower and assume we'll be delivered a steady stream of students," said Sterling, who is best known for creating the Beowulf supercomputing cluster — a group of usually identical computers working together — while at NASA."

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