Sure, but that doesn't mean that they have standing on their own to request that portions of the trial be closed.

Which Goldman Sachs lawyer? Since Aleynikov is being prosecuted criminally, not sued, it's the federal prosecutor in court claiming wrong-doing; Goldman Sachs' lawyers aren't representing either side.

I've been really happy with this approach, personally. I run eGroupware on my server, and it in turn provides device-agnostic GroupDAV and SyncML services (among others) that I use to keep my smartphone (an iPhone 3G, but options exist for pretty much everything else too) synchronized. I don't use Evolution, but I understand that it is supported as a client (I use Thunderbird / Lightning, although there's currently a bug in one or both of them causing problems that I haven't tracked down).

On top of integrating well with my phone, desktop, and laptop, it also provides a decent web interface for it all that I can use when none of them are available. It doesn't provide its own mail server, but it integrates just fine with what I had already set up - and all communication (send/receive mail, synchronize, and web applications) is inside an SSL tunnel. The functionality I have, for personal information, is as good or better than every corporate Exchange system I've interacted with. And it's all open source, except for the pieces that run on my proprietary phone.

... buys you a middle class -- and I don't mean upper middle class -- lifestyle; esp. if you've got dependents to support as well. You can pull that nyc income and live in places where it goes a lot further, but you'll be commuting an hour or more (sometimes much more) to do so. After taxes, 100k there is roughly 65-70k take home (estimating broadly). In a place where a completely boring, typical one bedroom apartment goes for 1500/mo (outer boroughs) to 3000/mo (manhattan), monthly transit and commuter rail passes can set you back another 300/mo combined, and electricity is 3x as expensive as it is in the interior states, and groceries average 2x as expensive, that doesn't go very far.

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools:

The North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA), also known as North Central, is one of six regional accreditation organizations recognized by the United States Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

I'm not really sure where you are getting your information, but very basic Google searches are proving you wrong.

Seriously. Try to transfer your UofP credits to a state college and see what happens.

I don't have any UofP credits to transfer; as I said I am taking online classes elsewhere and my undergraduate degree is from a traditional university. However, my experience at traditional universities is that transferring credits between them is unreliable at best, and based at least in part on the opinions of the admissions people at the school you're transferring to.

"Do you actually believe that?"

You seem to be confusing the quality of pedagogy with the quality and depth of material. Yes, my impression is that teachers are held more accountable to students at University of Phoenix, as opposed to traditional universities.

"Many of the people in her *masters* program could not write at a college level. We were floored with the low quality of the people taking these classes."

That is also a separate issue. For myself, taking graduate classes online at another university, the fact that I didn't have to justify my ability to take the class before signing up was a boon... fewer hoops to jump through, no need to prove both my formal and informal education in the prerequisite material, etc. (I'll still have to go through all the hoops before I actually receive a Master's). It's a double-edged sword, sure, but it's useful to have universities that do it in addition to universities that don't.

"Big deal."

Just trying to point the discussion in the right direction - toward facts, rather than inaccuracies and hearsay. That may not change anyone's overall assessment, but at least it provides a better basis for making such a judgement.

"Overall, they're a pernicious influence in society."

If you see them as the trend toward which every college should go, yes. On the other hand, they also provide educational opportunities to a lot of people ignored or sidelined by traditional colleges, and as an additional option - like community colleges are an additional option - I see value.

Perhaps the difference in our opinion is really that I don't view traditional universities in as positive a light, particularly for people who don't fit into the expected mold, so the standard by which I judge Phoenix is lower.

That's an interesting take. The University of Phoenix is actually accredited, by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which in turn is recognized by the Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. Also, although I can't speak for UoP, the school I'm attending online offers recorded lectures (for aural learning and note-taking), discussion forums where the TA is active, opportunities to ask the professor questions live during class (naturally, this requires being online when the on-site class is being held) and plenty of homework to learn by doing.

I think you're also generally giving for-profit schools short shrift for little good reason; they don't spend (or seek) money based on football teams, or endowments, but are actively trying to sell the quality of pedagogy and student attention. From what little I've seen, they pay more attention to student feedback on teachers, and teachers aren't given free reign to treat students like crap just because they've done important research. That doesn't mean they're perfect, but - like community colleges - they have a place of value and importance in society.

So far I've done the traditional undergraduate degree, community college (actually after I got my Bachelor's), online classes, and yes a ton of learning on my own. They're all opportunities to learn and challenge yourself, with varying degrees and kinds of support infrastructure to encourage and help you. But they are definitely all different, and I think they do serve different purposes and subsets of the population.

This the essence of technical debt. Whether you're programming or deploying IT infrastructure, it's inescapable that sometimes you're going to have to include kludges to work around edge conditions, a vocal 1% of your users, or whatever. These kludges are eyesores, and fragile, but they're also as far as you could go with the time and budget you had.

Sometimes, accruing debt like this enhances your liquidity and ability to respond to change, so avoiding all kludges introduces other more obvious costs that slow you down and make you seem unresponsive to users or customers. But you can't just go on letting your debt grow all the time and not eventually come up technically bankrupt. Let it grow when you have to, but just as importantly make time to pay it down. A lot of this stuff can be paid down a little at a time, as you come across it a few months later. The pay-off if you're vigilant is that the next ridiculously urgent fix to that system can often be handled much more easily, without dipping down further... with patience and attention to maintaining this balance, you can reduce your technical debt and make the whole system hum.

The downside is that there isn't a quick fix when you find yourself deep in technical debt. You can't just spend all your time reducing it; your highest aspiration at that point should be maintaining the level of technical debt, rather than letting it grow, but it's generally been my experience that altering the curve of debt growth even a little can set you on the right path.

I worked there briefly years ago back when they were EVSX. EVSX was in turn founded by folks from the Austin branch of Exponential Technologies, which ironically was a company based around making fast processors for the Apple clone market of the 90s (for extra irony given Apple's years-later switch to intel cpus, exponential tech apparently worked both in PowerPC and x86, with Austin focusing on the x86 branch of development). In a sense, this acquisition is kind of like full circle for the company. I wish them all the best; they are an extremely bright and friendly group who were great to work with. I ended up leaving for a job paying slightly more with less commute, but ultimately I wish I'd stayed on as the people were better to work with at EVSX.

I skimmed it. One of the authors of MySQL I presume self-agrandising and taking credit for "saving" MySQL even though none of Oracle's promises are legally binding.

Those two sentences are completely contradictory. :-)

So, um, I take it you didn't read the article?

Two years seems to be the developer half-life in most shops. By that point if you're worse than average they've canned you, and if you're better than average your responsibilities have grown to the point that you're spending as much or more time dealing with cross-team organizational bullshit as you are doing what you actually love (writing code) and hence wanting to quit. :) The thing is, I think every gig has problems, and often they're the same tedious set of problems, but people jump in the hopes that maybe, maybe the grass will actually be greener THIS time. (After a decade or two of corporate culture, further, it's all too likely that the truly idiosyncratic individuals will have accumulated enough capital and enough disgust with the system that they give it all the finger and go run a bar just to pick one prominent example.)

The other direct motivator that comes to mind is money. All too many shops hire you at a rate that approximates more-or-less-if-you're-lucky Market Rate for your skills and so forth, then want to give you sub-10% raises for ever and ever thereafter. Ergo it's easier to ramp your salary in tune with your experience by jumping periodically. This is perhaps most prevalent in the first ten years of a programming career as there are big deltas at roughly two and five and seven-ten years of experience as you start to [potentially] hop up the org chart some from junior to regular to senior dev.

So in short I think that getting fed up with a given situation and taking steps to change it for (hopefully, maybe not, probably not... but hopefully) the better is both normal and healthy. Or are you of the opinion that backing the same crappy horse for years is the best way to go through life?

If only that headline used "Nuking" instead of "Using" Outlook from Orbit.

My company recently switched from a really screwball lotus notes install to msexchange and thereby screwed every unix and mac user -- which is to say, 95% of the technical staff. Some of that I can't blame MSFT for, we do have some real chimpanzees on our email team, but the experience does have me shaking my fist in Redmond's direction even more than usual of late.