11. Software engineers must be addressed as “High Priest, Master of All Things Java.”
10. Project managers required to attend sensitivity training on “Deadline Flexibility”.
9. Pizza and Chinese food industries convince US businesses to stop outsourcing tech jobs to India.
8. Every Friday is “Work on useless code you think is leading edge” day.
7. Annual $1,000 stipend for purchasing cool stuff to put on your desk.
6. Constitution tweaked every two weeks.
5. Clean desks would be punishable by 15 lashes.
4. Free Xbox game for every 100 lines of code you write.
3. “Whatever” and “Same as last week” are perfectly acceptable status reports.
2. All technical issues resolved by saying “Well, it works on my PC.”
1. Congress passes Cubicle Prohibition Act.

BB Spot | Top 11 Things That Would Happen If Software Engineers Ruled The World

Balls Deep wrote:
] Yeah, Yeah everyone has seen this. Someone right now need to
] setup a page that takes paypal donations to defend the poor
] sap that sco is going to sue. Not that creating viruses is
] cool, but because SCO is yet another turd that needs to be
] wiped from the planet. My first sysadmin job was working with
] SCO, and I replaced it with Linux because SCO sucked so bad.
] I didn't want it to come to this, but it is time.
] BallsDeep officially declares war on SCO!!

The ironic part is this SCO isn't even the original SCO. This is a small spin off of the Caldera / SCO merger. The old SCO is now known as Tarantela. As far as I know, the current SCO group doesn't even make any significant revenue from a product. Their business model seems to be lawsuits and intellectual property licencing for Sys V unix. Their claims of IP theft inside current linux distributions has not yet been proven. Novell is contesting their claim to the rights to SysV in the first place (Novell sold SCO unixware in the early 90s). SCO group is nothing more than bottom feeding, opportunistic scum.

RE: SCO Offers Reward for Arrest and Conviction of Mydoom Virus Author (BallsDeep Declares war on SCO)

As Seinfeld once said.. Not that there's anything wrong with that. As for me. No Thanks.

CLEVELAND (AP) -- Indians minor leaguer Kazuhito Tadano is asking for forgiveness for what he called a one-time mistake -- his appearance in a gay porn video in which he engaged in a homosexual act.

Tadano took part in the video three years ago when he was a college student. Sitting in the Cleveland clubhouse Tuesday, the pitcher said he hoped to put his actions in the past.

"All of us have made mistakes in our lives," Tadano said, reading a statement in English. "Hopefully, you learn from them and move on."

Cleveland Indians prospect asks forgiveness for role in gay porn video

I feel myself becoming a mac zealot.. Yeah, I switched!

Virginia Tech's decision to replace its "Big Mac" supercomputer processors with Apple Computer Xserve G5 servers will make the installation more attractive to the federal agencies and organizations negotiating with the university for its novel supercomputer technology.
...
The installation has been up and running for a few months, but the swapping of G5s for Xserve servers will shrink the size of the installation. "We'll cut the space used by a factor of three," said a university spokeswoman. "We'll go from 3,000 square feet to 1,000 square feet."

Info Week | Customers Eye Virginia Tech's Supercomputer Upgrade

...And it wasn't even in a southern state.

Kingston was 24 when he took LuAnn Kingston as his fourth wife in 1995. Family members say he has at least 17 children.

At a hearing in October, Kingston told the judge: "I had a relationship, a sexual relationship, with LuAnn for about four years. That relationship ended about four years ago."
...
Last year, Jeremy Kingston's uncle, David Ortell Kingston, was released from prison after serving four years for committing incest with a 16-year-old niece.

CNN | Man sentenced for marrying his 15-year-old cousin

wilpig wrote:
] ] Check the year-end reports from the various sectors of
] ] the entertainment industry, and it's clear that DVD
] ] stands alone as an unqualified sensation. It's such a
] ] success that it might even be eclipsing - and
] ] cutting into - other leisure pursuits.
] ]
] ] Each DVD amounts to a consumer devoting money and time to
] ] watching a movie at home, sometimes in lieu of going to a
] ] theater or watching TV or listening to a CD.
]
] Are you listening to this RIAA? Its *NOT* only peer2peer
] trading that is responsible for your sagging sales. There are
] a number of factors, and probably the biggest is that other
] entertainment avenues are taking a larger slice of the pie.
]
] If you'd listen, you'd hear consumers voting (with their cash)
] that other entertainment avenues currently represent a better
] value for the money then a mediocre CD with 2 good tracks.
]
] LB
The album format needs to die. A $5 EP CD with 2-5 songs makes tons more sense and would sell a lot better as a result of the better price and missing songs we generally don't want anyway. I love music but personally have many more DVDs than CDs now.

RE: DVD's success steals the show

This is wicked cool. A Mac integrated into a car, with custom software.

All I can say is, "Why doesn't a system like this exist in production cars?"

SWEET!

Tatra Mac G4 - fastest Mac on the four wheels?

Shipping work overseas saves money that drops to the bottom line as profit.  Stock prices are today keyed to earnings-per-share as is, to a certain extent, executive compensation.  Now look at the average time that an institutional investor actually holds a given stock.  This can be measured in months, sometimes in weeks, but hardly ever in years.  So the investor timeline is short and the CEO timeline -- with average tenancies in those positions at less than five years -- is not much longer.  So offshoring works great for these two groups.  The stock goes up and along with it, the CEO's bonus and stock options.  By the time the long-term effects of this policy are felt, both the investors and the CEO are long gone.  And even if the CEO is still around, it is with a golden parachute negotiated long before that often pays him more to go away than he might have got to stay.

I have to admit that I have begun to plot my path out of tech and get my house paid off. The world economy has changed and the bottom line is the end of the line.

PBS Cringely on IT Outsourcing

Captain Kangaroo, a round-faced, pleasant, mustachioed man possessed of an unshakable calm, was both unique and welcome when his show premiered on Oct. 3, 1955.

I guess Captain Kangaroo was the Sponge Bob equivalent for my generation. Rest in Peace Capt. K. You made a difference while you were here.

NY Times | Capt. Kangaroo dead at 76

It is good to see the military engaged in humanitarian missions from time to time.

MOSCOW, Russia -- Russian troops have retrieved 10 tons of beer trapped under Siberian ice, the Itar-Tass news agency has reported.

The truck carrying the beer sank when trying to cross the frozen Irtysh river, near the Siberian city of Omsk, around 2,200 km (1,400 miles) from Moscow.

The driver and his partner managed to escape, leaving the beer-laden truck.

The rescue team of six divers, 10 workers and a modified T-72 tank from the Emergencies Ministry managed to save the load after a week-long operation.

CNN | Army deployed in beer rescue