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Comment: Re:Stay Put (Score 1) 772

by RetroRichie (#37070198) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Learn New Programming Languages?

A) Perhaps acknowledge the realities of the economy and take less money? I don't know how much you're talking about but 80% of what you made previously is still more than zero.

B) Computerworld just published statistics saying the IT unemployment rate is 3.8% nationally. Look elsewhere? Take a contract?

C) Four of the eight developers who work for me are in their mid to late 50s. I find your discrimination story difficult to process. I don't mind training technologies, but training process is a horrible experience. I like hiring you old fogies. :)


by RetroRichie (#36239144) Attached to: Apple Acknowledges MacDefender

My wife is a good control for your contest. She has both a Mac and a PC and she is about as uninformed as it gets when it comes to security. Her Mac has no preventative utilities, and is virus and malware-free. Her PC has every matter of preventative security running at all times, and I am still cleaning viruses and malware off that bastard every single month. Granted the PC is running XP and not Windows 7, but still... this is an ongoing 2-year experiment, and her Mac is clean as a whistle. I have had to actually reinstall XP twice, her PC was so jacked up.

Comment: No (Score 1) 613

by RetroRichie (#34775446) Attached to: First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter

Patently false. Defense spending right now is the highest it has been since WW2 when adjusted for inflation, and WW2 should be the high watermark in our nation's history.

Defense spending is the third largest bucket in the federal budget. OK, that's not "most" of government spending, but it is highly significant. Our percentage of global defense spending has increased from 1/3 to 1/2 in recent years, mostly because of the decline of the USSR but with that in mind our budget should be adjusting accordingly--it's not. Instead, we choose to spend 6X the defense budget of China, which by all accounts is the only major threat to our existence. Meanwhile, they are yucking it up and killing us economically. Something has got to give.

Comment: Re:And yet- (Score 1) 828

by RetroRichie (#33087710) Attached to: What's Wrong With the American University System

Disagree completely. I am 10 years removed from my computer science undergraduate degree and am halfway through my MBA program. The classes are at least half free discussion (albeit guided to a particular topic) and the professors, for the most part, are extremely motivated and care about educating as much as publishing--I have had several professors even say if you don't care about teaching, you should not be in this business. And comparing it to my high school experience 15 years ago is pretty much laughable--high school was a joke and I have never been more challenged in my entire life than I am right now.

Now, to be fair it is a top school, and if I contrast it with some of the programs that my friends are in their experience is practically night and day. So YMMV. But to slander the entire American University system seems fairly silly to me. It seems more like as with anything you get what you pay for, and you get back what you put in.

Comment: No....I don't belive it!! It's not possible. (Score 5, Funny) 90

by RetroRichie (#26818813) Attached to: Scientists Harvest Nano-Power From Hamsters

The hamster generates more bio-electricity than 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTVs of body heat. Combined with a form of piezo-electricity, the humans have found all the energy they would ever need. There are stores...endless pet stores, were hamsters are no longer born. We are grown. For longest time, I wouldn't belive 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 Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a hamster into THIS.
