I worked for a place that moved to new office space, from cube land, into "modern" open office land.

The CEO said it was "cool" and "techie" and "everybody in 'the valley' was doing it."

It sucked wind. I mean, it blew, hard. Cube land was no bargain, the cubes were about 7 by 6 feet, but at least you could pretend you had a bit of privacy to make a phone call, to send an email, to generally have your own space. Open office land was 24 inch deep, 5-foot wide desks with a foot tall divider between you and the next person. You could swivel your head and see heads in all directions, and hear and see what everybody was doing, and it was loud. You could not roll your chair back too fast for fear of clobbering the person behind you. It sucked. (Did I mention that it sucked?)

It was no place to concentrate -- it was quite focus-proof.

The open office was not chosen for the "cool" factor, it was chosen for the "cheap" factor, because it could better than double the employee per square foot density. This was a growing, profitable, privately held company, and there was no need for it, except to make the owner's take better.

Open office can work in places where it is not done for the wrong reasons. Give people some personal space, install acoustic treatments and dividers, and it can work. Treat people like sardines, and those that can swim away, will.

wtf is abstinence? sounds like a form of punishment.

I choose to abstain from abstinence.

What does our dear leader stand for, anyway? It's getting hard to tell.

The warrant-less collection of telephone metadata is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, but Mr. Obama (constitutional lawyer that he allegedly is) continues to disregard that document whenever it becomes inconvenient. Just yesterday, he got his willy slapped by the 5th circuit appeals court for overstepping his constitutional authority -- again -- this time because of a unilateral decision on immigration that got the attention of 26 states.

my god, people, if you are going to use a site like that, don't use your real name, work email address, etc.

consider that *everything* is going to get compromised -- if it is not already. use some common sense.

Since we are thinking about latency, propagation delay, then microwave is almost 50% faster than fiber for a straight line path, and most fiber networks don't go straight, but microwaves (that is to say "radio") does. This is because light does not propagate down a fiber as fast as radio waves do in "free space."

Bandwidth is another thing. You can get a lot more bits per second onto a terahertz carrier than on a gigahertz carrier.

So, if latency is the issue, maybe fiber is not fast enough.

This is not really news, we've seen anecdotal evidence of high-speed traders using microwave networks to gain a slight speed advantage over their competition using fiber networks.

can we get this without the posturing? Yeah, maybe congress is 99% populated with idiots, but what does that have to do with this book? And what does this have to do with the

Since when did slashdot turn into boingboing?

the editing department needs a high colonic, me thinks. This site is losing it's relevance.

People's toilets will forever be stopping up. And it is a hands-on job to un-stop them. The wages are good, often better than IT.

I have less waste than the aerobie. No only spent grounds. No bleached paper filters.

nespresso is even worse the k-cup. Though they both are pretty bad. an awful lot of waste for some convenience.

me? I grind my own beans and put them into the portafilter of my 20-year-old Saeco espresso machine -- it won't die. The only waste is the spent coffee, and I feed that to my compost heap.

I'm a digital native.

I learned to program on a DEC-20, PDP-8, PDP-11, and later worked on VAX-11 and Alpha, for Digital. How much more Digital (tm) do you want?

There was a 4.2 near Portage, Michigan, where people are not used to earthquakes.

There were THREE earthquakes in New Hampshire in the last couple weeks, where people are also not used to earthquakes.

How is this news?

Another slow news day at Slashdot?

Get a grip, Timothy. NOT NEWS.

Silicon Valley was nowhere in the 60s. Everything has it's rise and fall

Consider what happened around Boston, look at the wreckage of the computer industry there:

Symbolics, Lisp Machine, Prime, Data General, Wang, ComputerVision, and (of course) Digital Equipment Corporation.

For a while, route 128 was the epicenter of the American computer industry. Now, those companies are all dead.

It's coming for you, California! Silicon Graphics, Sun... Gone... HP is already circling the drain. Apple's remarkable boutique computer business can only last so long. The web companies are largely one-trick ponies, just waiting to lame up. (We saw what happened to Twitter's valuation last week...)

I call bullshit on this article.

You don't need to sign a non-compete in California, your employer already has signed one for you!

They've all secretly agreed not to poach! Who needs a non-compete agreement when your employer's competitors have all agreed not to hire you!

If it had not been a GE machine at Dartmouth, it would have been something else that Kemeny and Kurtz wrote BASIC on.

What utter claptrap. Ridiculous.

what could possibly go wrong with this plan? would a laser that powerful represent a destabilizing weapon? If you can de-orbit "space junk" what else can you de-orbit? How could you regain control over a ISS taken by person(s) intent on using it as a weapon?