Parent modded 'Funny'; actually, was a slight exaggeration... it would be 101.

> We've accomplished all the easy, flashy stuff.

Landing on the moon was easy?!

Oracle will probably sell her column off anyway, or at least take someone to court over it.

> Java is deprecated.

What?

I'm in the UK, not the US. I'm a post-doc in CS.

As many others have pointed out, fraud is rare. It probably makes for good headlines, but I have never personally seen or heard of an instance of fraud.

The negative side of academia (for me) is the growing trend of heavy focus on metrics, e.g. the number of papers published (sometimes weighted by impact factor), or the number of citations a paper receives. This is generally a result of top-down meddling by the government and distracts scientists from doing good work. I disagree with it and try to avoid thinking about this game.

I have not chased publications, but my career is going just fine.

Some people claim that you have to work 60+ hour weeks etc. to be a successful academic. In my experience, this isn't true. Some people do work those hours, but most of them have poor time management skills and are not very productive. I don't see anyone working significantly more hours than myself achieving more over an extended period. They tend to get tired, burn out a bit, and spend a lot of time procrastinating. You can be a successful academic by working reasonable office hours, plus the extra hour here or there, maybe a weekend day occasionally, and then a little extra around deadlines. You just need to be organised and disciplined.

So, don't believe all the negativity you read. I love my career, and I love the flexibility that academia gives me. I work with tons of creative people in a relaxed environment where I set my own hours, have a large say in what I do, and get to work with intelligent students who keep me on my toes!

Oh, the money sucks ;-) It's enough to comfortably live on, but compared to industry (and given the sacrifice of doing a PhD in the first place) it is a serious financial sacrifice. I am considering going back into industry at some point in order to build some savings.

Hope that's of use.

RS

Good point - you've hit on a major concern of Cloud migration.

There are two answers to this scenario, the first being "the law needs to catch up with the tech", so that this situation could not arise, and the second being "anything that is critical, e.g. IP, should be stored off-cloud, and accessed only when necessary via secure communication". Encryption is your friend - and there are ways of ensuring that encryption keys will only be available if your company is sued, etc. (i.e. the situation we have right now).

RS

"Firstly, the schedule for manufacture for every UK business we approached was between 12 and 14 weeks (compared to a 3-4 week turnaround in the Far East)."
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509
[Posted on January 10th, 8.5 weeks ago - and manufacturing had already started at that point].

I guess UK manufacturing wouldn't have been much slower, after all.

RS

> So sorry if Bitcoin is flawed to the point where it can be so easily stolen by little old root

This is a really good point. Why is such an important password even known by anyone? If it is a system-wide password that can be used in the way it has, then you might think its very existence is a bad idea. Use public/private key authentication instead, if this account *must* exist, and physically print those keys out, possibly in parts, and distribute them in extremely safe locations (security deposit boxes, for example) just in case the account ever needs to be used. It should not be required on a day-to-day basis. Even if you make the mistake of allowing it to be used in that way, then the people with access to that information should be very few and highly vetted.

RS

> Those people had no business storing $15,000 worth of irreplaceable data, electronic currency or not, on a service with these kinds of terms. Instead of spending an appropriate amount of money for the proper security they gambled with a service not designed to insure against that kind of liability and lost.

This is absolutely correct. I'm reading the most basic introductory books to cloud architectures at the moment, and this is constantly brought up. If you have vital data like this, store it encrypted and off-cloud. If you have to use it within your application servers, either fetch it from the off-cloud location, or else use encryption and distribute the data so that a single compromise (e.g. of one cloud provider) cannot result in a complete compromise of your data.

Linode should pay up, but the users are (for once) to blame.

RS

You may find use for this:

http://www.simplynoise.com/

> I'm just waiting for them to abandon the hard drive entirely, in favor of a coin slot. Using your computer will be just like internet video poker.

We use Bitcoin in this community, you insensitive clod!

Surely the issue is not how much data you have, but how much bandwidth you need.

You can physically perform the initial transfer, so no problem if it's 1GB or 100TB.

The question is, do you need to access more of that than the bandwidth can carry?

If you need to extensively modify all of that data each day, then clearly cloud won't work for you if those modifications require lots of data from outside the cloud data centre.

RS

> if you need something that "just works," Debian is definitely the way to go.

Now there's something you'll never hear in an Apple store. Only on Slashdot :-)

> Seriously, the 30% cut just for managing the payment stuff *alone* is a bargain, as anyone who has ever had to handle a merchant account and payment processing will tell you, especially for small transactions. It is very expensive and time consuming to deal with.

Nonsense. Payment transaction charges are nothing like 30%.

I used to work for a company that handled credit card processing, hosting, bandwidth, web servers and designed web storefronts for third party companies. Our cut was nowhere near 30%. AND we warehoused, sorted, picked, packed, and dispatched real physical items. They just told us what products they wanted to sell, and we did the rest.

So, yeah, 30% is a lot for the actual services being provided. What Apple are charging you 30% for is the ability to appear in the App Store, which they have a monopoly over.

RS