About 7 years ago, I moved from California to Argentina for work. I had a degree in CS and had worked professionally as a Java dev for three years. I couldn't get any work in the US so I decided to brush up on my spanish and see if I could find a job down there.

After arriving in Argentina, I translated my resume and started looking for work by finding the equivalent of Monster.com (bumeran.com). It took about 3 weeks, but I got interviews at both Sony and IBM. IBM wanted to send me to Canada for consulting because I spoke english :). Since that wasn't the goal, I went with Sony. Lots of the labor in these places is not actually employed by the large corporation, but by a "placement" service. This company paid me $600/month for full-time employment. I had been making around 70k in the US, but in argentina the 10x paycut was manageable. Indeed, I was making 1/2 of some of my coworkers - because I wasn't legally employed, the placement company paid me less, but paid me in cash.

The experience was fantastic. There, 9-5 actually meant 9-5 - very limited flexibility in terms of hours and what I could work on, but it was okay, I was doing it more for the concept. The engineers were all excellent and my American education didn't either disadvantage or help -- we all were pretty up on the lastest java techniques.

After about 4 months, I decided that this glimpse into the future was sufficient so I returned to the US to do a PhD.

can't sue mozilla - no benefit / no money.

I agree with this. very sad the fracture into Unity and Gnome3. I run 12.04 with gnome2 - not optimal, but comfortable, and not *that* buggy.

+1

First, as usual, the post makes an infirmed attempt at giving the user any help in actually understanding the issue. Second, oracle has really never been successful in giving end-users a reasonably effective piece of software. They make great software and horrible interfaces. Using open office, I think about how great it would be if shuttleworth got into it. It is not as good as word and i say that with regret.

The thing I don't understand is the reviewer said he was in the UK -- where did the sunlight come from?

Thats exactly what I thought .... seriously though, I don't know if I can deal with any more of these SCO stories. Can we have a new icon to represent these? Maybe like a festering wound, or feces?

I think the pdf was quite good, albeit repetitive. In any case, in the end, I think he makes an interesting point about abstraction:

On the surface this seems fairly innocuous; why not make some abbreviations so that things can be said more economically? The problem is that definitions matter. They come from aesthetic decisions about what distinctions you as an artist consider important. And they are problem-generated. To make a definition is to highlight and call attention to a feature or structural property.

Learning to make good abstraction when programming is a difficult challenge, the right choice can have huge downstream consequences. An educational system which allowed students to get comfortable with the exploration of different abstractions, as well as, the forestalling of notation and rigour until the right rigour was appropriate would be a huge win to reasoning across the board.