The addition of 2 extra USB ports is useless, unless they have changed the polyfuse set up to allow more power to be delivered to the ports. As things currently stand with the original model B, attaching anything more than a low-power keyboard to the Pi requires a powered hub -- the Pi itself can't deliver the required juice. It would be great if this restriction were lifted.

Telugu person with a Kannada speaking spouse here...

Unless people are talking with their own friends that speak the same language at home about personal stuff (or they are bad-mouthing or saying "good but inappropriate" things), may people speak English. For almost all things computer related, I don't know of anyone that uses native language words.

This sort of venting definitely needs a native-language "MASK":
"This MASK(native-language based identifier of the colleague -- like tall guy, fat guy, etc) is a MASK(major league body cavity and x-ref to his mother), so MASK(be very careful)."

I feel there is some good news in there.

Thanks to Big Data awareness (there is potential there even if we factor in all the hype), the focus of the curriculum in many CS schools will shift more towards math and algorithms (for databases, system resource considerations, etc. -- core math/science and engineering), instead of "pure IT" or "software/computer use" [e.g. teaching html markups, office suites, configuring networks, basic sysadmin, etc.]

Or, may be I am in my own bubble and we are going to see degree programs that are named "computer science" and focus on HTML5, web app development, game development, etc. In which case, the wheels on the bus go round and round...
 

For things like Hadoop, it makes sense to have a reasonably large enough set of machines at one's disposal. On work machines, one is likely to run into disk space issues (vs. multiple terabytes at disposal at home). Unless the company one is working at has virtualized everything and can give clusters on demand.

I found it to be easier to buy a "cloud server" from ebay for a little over 1k (fairly reasonable specs) and just go crazy with it.

If you are stuck between mundane (e.g. boss's email not working) and serious (e.g. database servers are not responding), it may be wiser to offload that part at a lower cost per employee (instead of a network admin to be a backup while you work on help desk issues)?

I've seen the problem where expensive servers are never installed (they sit unplugged for months) because people are busy fixing email client configs...

"String 'em along, get lots of cheap labor, and every once in a while give somebody a faculty position so the rest could dream."

It is worse when the postdoc is at the same place as the Ph.D. The incentive is that one sees a "jump" in salary from one stage to another (a grad student making 25k becomes a postdoc making 50k, who in turn becomes a "research professor" or assistant professor without tenure making 75k). By the time the person realizes the missed opportunity cost and lack of good prospects in the future, it is often a bit too late. In some cases, one would end up specializing way too much in one obscure area (which would have seemed to be the most important thing when one is in the thick of it), and really may not be able to figure out why the rest of the world doesn't care. Worse when the obscure area is a shrinking field.

For people that are motivated, there is still some good if one excels at the game. This rule of prison life is very applicable: Assert your dominance [independence, importance, etc.] from the start or you'd become someone's bitch.