As I moved from programmer to team lead to manager to director, I had to delegate more and more of my technical responsibilities to others. As an accomplished programmer, I missed many of my old duties, in which I had excelled. But along the way, I realized that my real value to the company was no longer in the code I could personally write, but in my ability to build a team and help them be successful. I still write code for fun at home, but on the job, I have learned to let others do the hands-on work, even if I KNOW I could do it 5 times faster. I learned that it's less about getting today's programming done quickly, as it is about mentoring others to be able to do it for themselves.

I think the same principles apply to IT, or just about any other profession.

The story of the conversation with the Postmaster General sounds...made up. Oh, I believe that USPS didn't want anything to do with digitizing snail mail. But why would the Postmaster General take this guy as a serious threat? All the USPS had to do was ignore the upstart with an unworkable business plan and wait for it to go away.

Consider: Would snail mail marketers really want a crummy looking photocopy of the original advertising? No way! And documents like bills and agreements were already going totally digital anyway. At the time, money was still hard to send digitally, but banks (at the time) wouldn't have wanted original checks delivered as lousy photocopies.

So USPS didn't buy the plan. The founder of this company couldn't accept failure, so he looked for someone to blame.

Books are for grad students. Oh wait, you are one!

I hope you plan to become a teacher or professor...if you want to be a computer programmer, it's time to quit school and start working!

In real life, if you have Google Fiber, you're still going to get only, at best, 100 Mbps.

http://arstechnica.com/busines...

Clearly, what we need to do is pass a new law to make it illegal to stow away in a plane's wheel well!

This time, the price increase is less than 15%. The first time around, it was 100%. Big difference!

Uncle Sam has seen fit to stipulate that all full-time employees must be provided benefits such as health insurance. Full-time is defined as "over 30 hours per week." So guess what? Companies that hire low wage workers limit their hours to less than 30 per week. So now they are WORSE off than they would have been without the law, because they can't make more money by working more hours!

In my 25 years working in IT, none of my passwords, weak or strong, have ever been hacked. Even my teenage sons, who have no idea about password strength, or site security, have never been hacked. And I doubt YOU can point to a single instance of someone hacking YOUR password.

Does password hacking happen? Yes, of course. Should we be careful? Yes. But there are much greater dangers, such as malware (which you no doubt HAVE had a personal brush with).

So if we need to put up with annoying security measures, let's at least focus on the more relevant dangers, rather than forcing us all write down our passwords and stick them to the bottom of our keyboards!

Well, Oracle WAS dumb enough to take on the project in the first place!

Worse, that refrigerator and stove will be commandeered to send more spam!

If software were a closed system, you might be able to argue that the number of bugs is finite. But it's not.

For example, if you know what you are doing, you can write code that is immune from SQL injection attacks...today. But SQL will change, and it is possible that in the future, SQL will add a feature, or experience a change, that will introduce a bug into your software that will make it once again possible to inject SQL, using an entirely new approach.

Given the complexity of the interactions between various systems within the computer, and the software being designed, there really IS an infinite potential for bugs.

The author argues that it's taking longer for physicists to receive Nobel Prizes. Maybe it's the Nobel Prize process that's slowing down! Maybe the Nobel Prize committee no longer knows what they are looking for! Maybe the Nobel Prize committee is hamstrung by political correctness. Whatever the reason, how does the length of time it takes to award a Nobel Prize, have anything to do with the actual progress of science???

Scary diseases aren't limited to undiscovered tribes. We have flesh-eating bacteria in the U.S. If you are looking for the sky to fall, you don't have to go to South America. In other words, you might be right, but even if we stayed away from these tribes, we wouldn't necessarily be safer.

How about a third option: alive and part of modern society! It is not an either-or proposition. The thing to do here is figure out what is killing them, and find solutions!

Unfiltered information might make people think, but it certainly doesn't make them smarter. If you have done Google searches for things like conspiracies, alternative medicine, paranormal phenomena, etc., you will find that there is a lot of absolute idiocy out there on that unfiltered Internet.

When it comes to God, only one of the two groups is right: those who believe in God, or those who don't. Neither side seems to me to be doing a lot of THINKING these days, but a whole lot more accusing and finger-pointing.