As an Oregon resident adjacent to Oregon City (an actual city) this headline was a bit confusing.

As an aside, "Oregon City" and "The Dalles" (including the) are both great examples of how bad Oregon is at naming cities.

There are plenty of 25-41 year old folks w/ hardcore hardware/firmware skills.

IBM has a culture problem and a huge wage problem, I will always opt to get paid more to work for a less stuffy company. They would need to be paying a hefty premium to make up for their reputation which, anecdotally, they aren't even bothering to keep up with their competition.

I think it's was more the 1-2 punch of reddit, followed by discord.

Reddit slowly but surely absorbed general discussion, current events, generic tech stuff, generic gaming, and so on. Why discuss with a relatively small audience when you could discuss with the entire hivemind?

Discord seems to be finishing the job reddit started by peeling off the niche interests that aren't large enough for reddit's algorithm to care about.

Annoyingly enough, most of my hobbies (especially wrenching on cars) have an insane amount of knowledge trapped in forums that are likely all dead photobucket/imgur links or just plain gone. Often times internetarchive has caught the text, which I guess is something, but that certainly didn't help me with "here's the problem, I circled it in red") from 2006. =\

My grandfather became a pharmacist after being discharged post-WWII and ran his own pharmacy that served a small community until the 80s. When he was reminiscing about the old days he used to talk about calling the doctors to discuss the drugs they were prescribing and what alternatives they might consider that may be more effective or simply cheaper for the patient. He also mentioned the surprising number of mistakes he caught.

They also definitely served as a first line of defense for the doctors regarding any issues with the medication or minor problems that could be solved with something off-the-shelf. When we were kids he definitely saved my folks a number of doctors visits with occasionally wacky off-label uses for over-the-counter stuff.

His business eventually got absorbed by a chain, which then in turn got absorbed by a larger national chain. I don't have a lot of pity for Wallgreens or CVS, companies like Amazon will roll them the same way they rolled over independent pharmacies 40-50 years ago.

I do have pity for the Pharmacists and Doctors. Pharmacists will have their knowledge and experience, the requirements and bill for which is not small, commoditized even further. And Doctors will have to pick up the slack because a pharmacist working in an Amazon sweatshop undoubtedly is going to have to meet some unreasonable productivity goal that won't leave them time to do much more than the minimum due diligence.

The NCEES does now have a Computer Engineering option that looks much more reasonable for those of us that are more on that side of things. Sadly Oregon requires references from three licensed Engineers to apply. I have yet to run into anyone that is actually licensed (heck 90% of my coworkers haven't even taken the FE), likely because the CE option is very new.

While I was an undergrad student the department installed these in our labs, it is very frustrating to have the lights go out on you while soldering surface mount components. Late one evening (or early one morning) I decided I'd had enough so I poked around in the ceiling and bypassed the lighting controller.

Not quite as simple as a drinking bird but very effective.

> A peer and I once made the same comparison. We called ourselves digital maintenance men, because by and large that's what it is.

Myself and a friend of mine frequently refer to ourselves as code janitors, we are both well educated and work for Fortune 100 companies.

Unfortunately this is an easy position to get socked into. Companies generally want to make money, this generally requires staying on schedule, this means you get to inherit this lump of awful code/infrastructure $lastGuy left and beat on it until you meet your deadlines. No idea why $lastGuy left, he probably got a job at a competing company for $salary*1.2 where he will beat on some similar, yet different code for a while before moving again.

I live in Hillsboro and have no complaints, though I have hardware in one of those datacenters so I may be biased. I think these articles are failing to account for the jobs created indirectly. I know a few folks that work for companies that have hardware in one of these local datacenters, in addition to traditional sysadmin jobs their duties include being on-call for hardware failures and the like. A at least one of these companies is fairly large and chose to come to Hillsboro and hire techs here because of the space available.

The Gulf of Mexico didn't "break Aunt Hilda's internet." Were Google to simply stop providing service to Verizon customers due to the way Verizon was doing business I guarantee you they would have half their customer base marching on the nearest customer service center.

Same here. I took VLSI Winter 2009 and we spent an inordinate amount of time studying and working on sub-threshold designs. Part of our final project (and final exam) was to produce a simulated and laid-out circuit using a sub-threshold supply. It's not very complicated, you just lower your clockspeed and source voltage, most of your existing circuits work just fine. The major problem is that they are now working at very low clockrates (KHz as opposed to MHz) which doesn't make too many people very excited.

I passed over both Assassin's Creed II and C&C 4 due to the DRM (both of which resulted in canceled preorders). After hearing the horror stories about the more recent DRM "innovations" the vast majority of my gamer friends have followed suit.

Personally I won't purchase Assassin's Creed II until a crack or patch is released that resolved the DRM problem. If that means waiting until the game is a $5 steam special I'm fine with that, I don't have to play a game the instant it comes out.

What is so annoying about this entire affair is that I am not a thief, pirate, rampant violator of intellectual property, etc. I just want to be able to use the software I purchase without my crappy Comcast connection compromising my single-player gaming experience. Is this too much to ask?

I love how people keep trotting this out as an example of how EA is not really as "boring" and formulaic as the community makes them out to be. That is the exception, not the rule. And they're making another one, so really EA just gained another formula to churn through every so-often.