Holy shit!!! This is an example of what was all frigging wrong with Occupy Wall Street!

You got a Ph.D. In computer science which means your wrote a thesis on a (hopefully) advanced topic in (hopefully) minute details with (hopefully) verified references and research.

During the 1-2 years you spent writing that thesis, did you even once consider what you'll do next?

When you write a Ph.D. thesis, you do it :
  A) because you already has a research position or professorship lined up and plan on staying permanently planted at the school.
  B) you received funding for your research from an organization who intends to employ you afterwards
  C) you have evaluated the job market and lined up a research project that would start a bidding war of your elite skills.

If you didn't do any if these, why didn't you just go to an art school, run up $200,000 in loans and learn to play chopsticks on a banjo?

You have a Ph.D. that claims you're now among the intellectual elite... And the first thing you do is make a total jackass out of yourself.

A computer science degree is supposed to say something about your ability to solve complex problems. Here's one... Figure out how to get a damn job. Do research and if you have to work at McDonalds in the mean time.

Why not?

Modern 3d printers are dot matrix style. Slow moving heads with poor resolution dependent on head alignment. Using photosensitive polymer resins it should be possible to make a head similar to a laser printer which can remove an entire axis of motion and substantially increase performance. Add ejection of color dye as well and it's even better. Printing 3d doesn't have to be expensive as the materials become more readily available and printers become more evolved.

Politics sabotaged it. Representatives on both sides added as many ear marks as possible and otherwise too many cooks spoiled the soup.

If you look at the original proposal, it wasn't nearly this bad. In fact, most of the current issues with the system weren't likely to have been issues with the original system. Instead of ditching and and saying "fuck it", the administration got a system in place that hopefully can be patched and fixed in the future. I have little faith in that.

Obama's mistake wasn't that he wanted people to be healthy and he wanted everyone to have to pay instead if just giving free healthcare to anyone who couldn't afford it (how it was before). His mistake was not bullying back.

I hope whoever is next... Republican or democrat can show more strength and say "this isn't working... We're going to fix it. Anyone who argues with me, I'll destroy in the press".

I kinda agree with both of you thanks to your example.

The Russian market took a nose dive because of borderless trading. If it were a closed system, outside investors couldn't have affected it so much.

Basically, the value of the shares have absolutely nothing to do with the companies or their performance. It's all about trends in squiggly lines. If a panic starts in either direction, more and more people trade and increase volumes. Everyone tries to buy low and sell high, but gambling related panic causes traders to lose nerve and sell low sometimes to cut losses hoping to buy back in before it rises again.

The panic is generally triggered by news stories which are written by people who don't understand the business they're writing about (for example, Amazon who is treated like a sales website only) for people who understand even less and don't care. It just makes them rush to see if the share will rise or fall.

In short, you're both kinda right. But if anyone suggests there is any more logic to the stock market than to a roulette wheel, they're full of crap.

To be fair... I have worked on many software projects in my life and have also worked with government software projects. A simple fact of life is that government funded software projects are only given to blood sucking leeches that intentionally underbid and lie their asses off about delivery schedules. Legitimate software houses who actually can plan projects and meet schedules are never evaluated.

From what I can tell, the site is up and running "mostly" only a year late and not nearly as over budget as I expected. What do you expect from a project initiated by uneducated people like politicians and sales people. They of course ask "computer experts" for help, but let's be honest... Politicians wouldn't know a qualified computer programmer from a Barbie doll.

I support ObamaCare aka ACA on a federal level simply because it requires one big ass database system to be made by one company with a whole nation of people to kick the crap out of the company making it. And let's be honest... Whether the system is for all of America or just a state, the system is almost the same.

Imagine if a state like Mississippi or Oklahoma had to get a system made? They'd hire a guy named Jom Bob from church to do it. They'd piss away the entire budget before they even found Jim Bob. They'd run it on index cards and toilet paper in type writers with no correction ink.

Is there anyone dumb enough on Slashdot to think :
  A) a government sponsored software project can be done without corruption, delays and major budget problems?
  B) all 50 states in America could actually manage to get a system up and running at a state level... Why not ask Florida about their prepaid college project and how bad that for screwed up. I worked at the company writing that one and that project was doomed to fail before it even started. They built the damn thing on Tandem computers with Thomas Conrad ArcNet and had a total of one guy who even knew how to boot the machine.

That is soooo RUDE!!! Are you suggesting Alibaba is not a serious corporate entity who closely monitors their sellers and ensures consumer safety and follows regulations in the countries they operate?

To be fair, I don't see how Alibaba has anything to do with Amazon. One is a legitimate vendor who has built a highly lucrative business model with sustained growth. The other is basically a swap shop site which most sane consumers would never consider typing a credit card number into. I have tried purchasing there 4 times and all 4 times, in response to what appeared to be legitimate postings, the vendors refused to ship unless I paid more or bought more. I honestly can't figure out how to use the site without being scammed.

The problem is, Amazon's share. People think the two companies are the same. Alibaba is more like an eBay than an Amazon.

I train massive numbers of people in BGP every year. The best would go for it. The average are just happy to peer and move on.

IT completely lacks process. ITIL is a joke. People insist on wasting time doing the same thing over and over. The best networking companies I know with the absolute best people are rarely more professional than a bunch of script kiddies. The best of the best hack away on networking and routing like and orangoutang playing with a toy piano. Modern IT is rarely better off than a bunch of idiots in comfort zones who make changes indiscriminately and send the invoice.

There is no profit in fixing BGP. It works and most IT engineers operating peers don't care. There is nothing which says "the internet won't work if we don't do this.". There's not even a clear line of how you would gain money by making such a change.

The internet will never implement a feature simply because it's useful or right. We do it because of the money, because it's fun or because our peering won't function without it.

Starting will always be low. After 3-5 years, you can expect much more. COBOL is for conservative organizations where computers enable business not define them. You'll work a few years and maybe end up in management or be stuck writing RPG for 50 years.

All banks will hire people with no experience just because the alternative is hiring no one. Want experience? Intern a summer or three.

The COBOL market is hard to get into. It also sucks to be in. But the pay is steady and the employers are stable. You'll be under-appreciated and you'll be bored to tears. But if you like personal stability, want the ability to get stocks in highly lucrative companies and have a bunch of free time to be a musician or climb mountains, it's an awesome job.

It's truly the job for people who work to live instead of living to work.

I left development when I saw what you call FDD be used in SCRUM.

I have recently after 3 years sabbatical started my first commercial development project. It will be a web based database and system manager. I have spent many hours researching the right tools and designing the right database scheme for the entire system. I have begun designing the goals of each sprint while setting realistic expectations for each developer.

Once the project is started, we will employ SCRUM in a modified form. Test driven development is a minimum requirement. Three people will write tests and two people will implement code.

I will use mediocre developers which are inexpensive and instead of writing code myself will constantly adjust the project to adapt to the resources on the project. I will use no "Star Developers". I'll trim out dead weight too. Everyone will pull their own weight. If I end up with a Star Developer", I'll trim him/her as well. I believe "Steady wins the race". I always want people who are happy just to code and get paid. I'm not interested in artists or creative people. Implement the code.

I didn't get creative with the design. I used methodologies that date back to 1969 and work. No fancy thinking... It was boring as hell. The point is simply to create a project with top quality and high maintain ability and a low cost in a reasonable period of time.

This is 2014... We have done it already. We don't need to write a new language, design a new method, invent a new management system... We need to build programs or tools which work. Creative people can make games. Weaker people can go back to school or change printer ink. Average is best.

hooray. someone who actually finally understands the point of the asimov stories. many people reading asimov's work do not understand that it was only in the later works commissioned by the asimov foundation (when Caliban - a Zero-Law Robot - is introduced; or it is finally revealed that Daneel - the robot that Giskard psychically impressed with the Zeroth Law to protect *humanity* onto - is over 30,000 years old and is the silent architect of the Foundation) that the failure of the Three Laws of Robotics is finally explicitly spelled out in actual words instead of being illustrated indirectly through many different stories, just as you describe, wisnoskij.

in the asimov series there _are_ actually robots that are successful. the New Law Robots (those that are permitted to *cooperate* with humans; these actually have some spark of creativity). Caliban - who had a Gravitonic brain - was a Zero Law Robot: an experiment to see if a robot would derive its own laws under free will (it did). and Daneel, whose telepathic ability and the Zeroth Law were given to him by Giskard. these robots are the exception. the three law robots are basically intelligent but entirely devoid of creativity.

you have to think: how can anything that has hundreds of millions of copies of the three laws be anything *but* a danger to human development, by preventing and prohibiting any kind of risk-taking?? we already have enough stupid laws on the planet (mostly thanks to america's sue-happy culture and the abusive patent system). we DON'T need idiots trying to implement the failed three laws of robotics.

in looking at why both apple and microsoft have been overwhelmingly successful i came to the conclusion that it is because both companies are using dynamic object-orientated paradigms that can allow components from disparate programming languages to be accessible at runtime. COM is the reason why, after 20 years, you can find a random Active-X component written two decades ago, plug it into a modern windows computer and it will *work*.

Objective-C is the OO concept taken to the extreme: it's actually built-in to the programming language. COM is a bit more sensible: it's a series of rules (based ultimately on the flattening of data structures into a stream that can be sent over a socket, or via shared memory) which may be implemented in userspace: the c++ implementation has some classes whilst the c implementation has macros, but ultimately you could implement COM in any programming language you cared to.

the first amazing thing about COM (which is based on MSRPC which in turn was originally the OpenGroup's BSD-licensed DCE/RPC source code) is that because it is on top of DCE/RPC (ok MSRPC) you have version-control at the interface layer. the second amazing thing is that they have "co-classes" meaning that an "object" may be "merged" with another (multiple inheritance). when you combine this with the version-control capabilities of DCERPC/MSRPC you get not only binary-interoperability between client and server regardless of how many revisions there are to an API but also you can use co-classes to create "optional parameters" (by combining a function with 3 parameters in one IDL file with another same-named function with 4 parameters in another IDL file, 5 in another and so on).

the thing is that:

a) to create such infrastructure in the first place takes a hell of a lot of vision, committment and guts.

b) to mandate the use of such infrastructure, for the good of the company, the users, and the developers, also takes a lot of committment and guts. when people actually knew what COM was it was *very* unpopular, but unfortunately at the time things like python-comtypes (which makes COM so transparent it has the *opposite* problem - that of being so easy that programmers go "what's all the fuss about???" and don't realise quite how powerful what they are doing really is)

both microsoft and apple were - are - companies where it was possible to make such top-down decisions and say "This Is The Way It's Gonna Go Down".

now let's take a look at the GNU/Linux community.

the GNU/Linux community does have XPIDL and XPCOM, written by the Mozilla Foundation. XPCOM is "based on" COM. XPCOM has a registry. it has the same API, the same macros, and it even has an IDL compiler (XPIDL). however what it *does not* have is co-classes. co-classes are the absolute, absolute bed-rock of COM and because XPCOM does not have co-classes there have been TEN YEARS of complaints from developers - mostly java developers but also c++ developers - attempting to use Mozilla technology (embedding Gecko is the usual one) and being driven UP THE F******G WALL by binary ABI incompatibility on pretty much every single damn release of the mozilla binaries. one single change to an IDL file results, sadly, in a broken system for these third party developers.

the GNU/Linux community does have CORBA, thanks to Olivetti Labs who released their implementation of CORBA some time back in 1997. CORBA was the competitor to COM, and it was nowhere near as good. Gnome adopted it... but nobody else did.

the GNU/Linux community does have an RPC mechanism in KDE. its first implementation is known famously for having been written in 20 minutes. not much more needs to be said.

the GNU/Linux community does have gobject. gobject is, after nearly fifteen years, beginning to get introspection, and this is beginning to bubble up to the dynamic programming languages such as python. gobject does not have interface revision control.

the GNU/Linux community does actually have a (near full) implementation of MSRPC and COM: it's part of the Wine Project. the project named TangramCOM did make an attempt to separate COM from Wine: if it had succeeded it would be maintained as a cut-down fork of the Wine Project. The Wine Project developer's answer - if you ask - to making a GNU/Linux application use COM is that you should convert it to a Wine (i.e. a Win32) application. this is not very satisfactory.

in other words, the GNU/Linux community has a set of individuals who are completely discoordinated, getting on with the very important task - and i mean that absolutely genuinely - the very important task of maintaining the code for which they are responsible.

the problems that they deal with are *not* those of coordinating - at a top level - with *other projects*.

now, whilst this "Alliance" may wish to "guide" the development of the GNU/Linux community, ultimately it comes down to money. do these companies have the guts to say - in a nice way of course - "here's a wad of cash, this is a list of tasks, any takers?"

but, also, does this "Alliance" have the guts to ask "what is actually needed"? would it be nice, for example, rather than them saying "this is what you need to do, now get on with it", which would pretty much guarantee to have no takers at all, would it be nice for them to actually get onto various mailing lists (hundreds if necessary) and actually canvas the developers in the software libre world, to ask them "hey, we have $NNN million available, we'd like to coordinate something that's cross-project that would make a difference, and we'd like *you* to tell *us* what you think is the best way to spend that money".

where the kinds of ideas floated around could be something as big and ambitious as "converting both KDE and Gnome to use the same runtime-capable object-orientated RPC mechanism so that both desktops work nicely together and one set of configuration tools from one desktop environment could actually be used to manage the other... even over a network with severely limited bandwidth [1]".

or, another idea would be: ensure that things like heartbleed never happen again, because the people responsible for the code - on which these and many companies are making MILLIONS - are actually being PAID.

but the primary question that immediately needs answering: is this group of companies acting genuinely altruistically, or are they self-serving? an immediate read of the web site, at face value, it does actually look like they are genuine.

however, time will tell. we'll see when they actually start interacting with software libre developers rather than just being a web site that doesn't even have a public mailing list.

[1] i mention that because the last time i suggested this idea people said "what's wrong with using X11?? problem solved... so what are you talking about?? i'm talking about binary-compatible APIs that stem ultimately from IDL files". *sigh*...

Hell... If you spend enough time at the range to actually ensure your skills are satisfactory enough to not be more dangerous than a gun that won't unlock, then maybe it wouldn't be a problem.

I personally also want laws passed requiring that guns used for self protection can't be activated without a corresponding video recording device.

Many of us have no issues with guns.... Only the people holding them. People with your personality are some of the scariest.

Or one could figure that Microsoft has a clear plan to capitalize and $2.5 was worth it to them. They will own a company that has done a better job the last few years on family games than Lego and Nintendo combined. Imagine if they had the resources of Microsoft.

Bash MS all you want, but XBox has been a pretty popular and successful gig. If anything, Sony was idiotic to let Microsoft beat them to this.

Many of us in Norway were promised global warming and now you f-ers are talking this crap about recovery!!!!!

What do we have to do to get you jerks to mess up some more ozone!!! I'm really not liking how this is turning out!

Excellent question. There are a few things that an ISP can reasonably complain to a customer about:

* Excess use of bandwidth (I am not going to discuss what 'too much' is)

* Loss of IP address reputation, by this I mean getting their IP range blacklisted by spamming, etc

* Using up too much of their admin time. This might include dealing with copyright/DMCA type requests (again not interested here in rights/wrongs)

So, 2 reasons for wanting to know (roughly) what content a customer is moving. But these go away with TOR since the TOR IP addresses have nothing to do with the ISP, so they should not care. So what other reasons are there ?

* Requests from FBI/NSA/... that they comply with, willingly or otherwise

* Want to know what a customer is doing so that they can profile them to better monitise the customer (eg sell more targetted adverts)

Anything else ?