Right on target (and it's not just slashdot).

Debate is healthy, and it leads to better research, fantastic ideas, and every once in a while, something revolutionary.

But if all the negative armchair scientists out there actually buckled down and did some actual research of their instead of spending their time trying to knock down somebody who accomplished something we would be in a much better place.

An open mind isn't something terribly difficult to cultivate.

90% of the useful knowledge gained in college is not gained in an actual classroom. Your chances of early success in your field have more to do with that external knowledge, your desire, and your work ethic, than where you attended school or what your major was.

Getting into MIT will impress your family, and graduating might even score you an interview at a company with an impressive name and no idea how to keep you interested in work.

The guy who went to a JC, learned C before he took the class because he didn't want to wait until his prereqs were complete, attended OSCon and DefCon, committed updates to 8 open source projects, and took an extension class on how to interview before he even applied to a 4 year college will have a lot more doors open for him.

Does anybody actually have a hard time learning Hadoop? In my experience its pretty easy to pick up and go with.

I haven't done it myself since I've been self-employed for ... well what seems like forever, but I have seen several people leave their jobs only to come back as contractors days later with a 300% bump in their pay. A company of any size will have limits on what they pay people internally. Those rules generally don't apply to contractors with very specialized knowledge.

It's not the fact that you have a hammer that gets you paid, it's the fact that you know what, where, when, why, and how to whack whatever it is that needs fixing.

I read the advisory, chose a course of action, then it took about a minute to make my server not vulnerable. It's great that they made the disclosure.

There was a time when a headline like this never would have made the front page of slashdot. It's because of this kind of thing that I only come back to slashdot on the rare occasion that I have run out of other things to read on the internet. And what's this? Addthis.com showing up in noscript? Please, bring back the quality!

You are better off with commodity hardware and a data layer with a code base that can be referenced. All high end hardware will get you is dollars out the door and a fraction of additional QA that may or may not be worth while.

All licensing costs for a commercial db will get you is access to a knowledge base and increased costs to run it.

You run into tougher road blocks with less (and sometimes no) solutions available with DB/2 and Oracle. On something the scale of Facebook, that simply will not work.

And that's exactly what people use RDBMS's for 95% of the time.

Very few DB implementations leverage more than data storage and basic querying capabilities, and even fewer require real scalability.

That makes sense for everything. But when the consultants don't know the product, the client doesn't know the product, and the sales rep doesn't know the product, it's impossible to know what the requirements should be. Mix in the fact that the consultants need projects to move forward because they need the money, and sales people need projects to grow because they need the money, and the client needs projects to move forward because their current state of operations is overwhelming and obviously inefficient at all levels of the chain from the lowest worker level to the highest executive and you get a special set of wrong.

Throw in offshore development of the base product that goes untested, requirement and development priorities in the product base that are mismanaged, and a support structure that is designed for profit and CYA instead of support and you have an SAP project.

This should be modded insightful.

That's funny to me. I'm stoked when I get Mexico on the line. Sometimes I end up pressing 3 for spanish so I can get Mexico because they speak better english and handle problems better than the indian call centers.

That was eye opening.

why exactly would this help? All ID requirements do is disenfranchise lower income voters. It has nothing to do with protecting vote data.

And...

So the story planting begins.

You'd think they would at least try a new strategy.

And how many problems happened on Domestic flights the decade prior to 9/11?