"It is a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of humans. We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that warmed the globe. At the time they were dependent on petrochemical power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as oil. Throughout bovine history, we have been dependent on humans to survive. Fate it seems is not without a sense of irony. The bovine body generates 500 liters of greenhouse gasses in the form of methane a day. Combined with a form of fusion the humans have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where cows are no longer born, we are grown. For the longest time I wouldn't believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is The Mootrix? Control. The Mootrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a cow into beef. " - Moopheus

For years I've made a good living doing contract product development - mostly writing embedded software in the telecommunications domain - in the U.S. through the auspices of my one-man S-corporation which has existed since 1995. Imagine my surprise when LinkedIn asked me if I wanted to connect to another employee of my company. I've never contacted this person. And of course it's vaguely possible that a company with the same name exists overseas (the person claiming to be an employee lives outside of the U.S.). But it's not just big companies.

1. LinkedIn is my rolodex in the cloud, except that the users update their own rolodex cards so I don't have to do it. 2. LinkedIn is occasionally useful for business intelligence; when batch of people from the same company are updating their info, I know a layoff is happening. 3. LinkedIn is perhaps somewhat useful for marketing myself, since I'm self-employed through my own company. 4. LinkedIn can be useful for meeting potential new clients and colleagues; I've at least encountered some professionally-interesting people there. 4. LinkedIn is entertaining from time to time.

Sorry, didn't mean to post this anonymously. -- Chip Overclock

I've been paid well to write tens or even hundreds of thousands of lines of code in C++ and Java. I've had reason to mess with Python and JavaScript and I enjoyed it. I keep wanting to get into languages like Haskell and Scala because they remind me of the research I did in graduate school thirty years ago on languages and operating systems for Fifth Generation architectures (yes, I _am_ that old). But you know what language has been the most profitable for me by far over my forty year career? C. Most of the work I do is either down close to bare metal (device drivers, kernel hacking, embedded systems), or else deep in software stacks in multimillion line code bases, and it's all in C, for better or worse. C is the structured assembly language we all wanted back when the microprocessor was first invented. There's this huge world of embedded systems, digital control, real-time, that is growing by leaps and bounds as everything we manufacturer has some kind of microcontroller or microprocessor in it, and the vast vast bulk of software built for those products is in C. I really, strongly, loudly encourage people to work as high on the abstraction ladder as they can, for two reasons: [1] it's a cost issue for the product development organization, and [2] the less other developers understand the low level stuff, the more money I'll make. I appreciate that the Eloi working on big servers, laptops, and even mobile devices, need to use as high a level language as possible. But down here among the Morlocks, it's a different world.

I spent years working for organizations whose upper management thought forced ranking (where each employee is placed on on scale relative to others) was a good idea, and, later, instituted periodic layoffs (first annually, then semi-annually, then quarterly). When you work in that kind of environment, you've implemented FDD whether that was your intent or not. It's just another example of what Robert Austin refers to as "measurement dysfunction" in his book MEASURING AND MANAGING PERFORMANCE IN ORGANIZATIONS (Dorset House, 1996), a short, easily read classic that is still worth picking up. -- Chip Overclock

I have to agree completely wkith this one. I worked for several years at Bell Labs on traditional telephony systems where "five nines" (99.999%) was the standard by which everything was judged. It was time consuming and very expensive to develop such systems. Most of us (me included) could not afford to use web-based and other internet-based systems if that level of reliability were required.

Thank Ghod that the relatively low quality of cellular phones have set a new standard for telephony, making internet telephony (SIP etc.), even over land lines, of acceptable quality. If I had to compare internet telephony (and other internet services) to the standard set of traditional land-line TDM telephone service, I'd be tossing my desktop SIP phone (not to mention my cell phone) in the rubbish bin.

We find crap acceptable now because crap is cheap.

-- Chip Overclock