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Agreed. The first post from a PS team member was essentially "no, we don't want to do that, if you have a problem with it open an RFC" ... only later when it was plainly obvious that they were wrong did they agree to do the RFC themselves


How is it wrong to put an alias when wget and curl are not standard Windows applications? Sure a lot of people use them but it's easy enough to create a new alias.

Don't people have better things to do than bitch about an alias??

Perhaps MS had goals on their inception to make the commandlets behave more like the true applications then changed directions.


I think the outrage is over the fact that MS broke any use of the command wget or curl and also, it doesn't even provide a compatible alternative to what they were aliasing ala busybox.


That's great and all but their alias does not support all the switches of wget/curl. I have both installed as compiled windows binaries on my machine and was pulling my hair out wondering what the hell was going on.


> How is it wrong to put an alias when wget and curl are not standard Windows applications?

Isn't that a trademark violation when a Big Corp is doing it officially in their software?


Are either curl or wget trademarked?


Yes, because all that is needed for something to be "trademarked" is for someone to use the term "in commerce" in a consistent fashion and to build an audience of expectation for what that word means in a specific region and context of discourse. When I see "curl", I know what that is: I know what it is supposed to be, and so it is trademarked in most reasonable countries. I assume your question is "did they register their trademark?", but one does not need to register one's trademark to receive the protections of a trademark, as that would make the law somewhat useless: the goal of trademark law is in many ways to protect users who are being tricked, not trademark owners.


cURL: https://curl.haxx.se/legal/thename.html, so it seems he has not obtained a trademark on this in the US and lives in Sweden, where trademarks aren't a legal thing.

wget: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Trademarks.html

wget is a GNU project (now at least, originally?). They seem to (makes sense) have a thing against acknowledging trademarks period. So I'm not sure it'd make sense for them to even try to enforce a trademark should someone make a product named (or alias their product to the name) wget.

Trademarks aren't a universal thing, not every country or culture will have an equivalent concept, legal or otherwise. And if products aren't trademarked then claiming trademark abuse is inaccurate.


"Don't people have better things to do than bitch about an alias??"

Now that's a cordial and produtive tone.


I just finished a PhD in Biochemistry. It's accurate (I got a job as a programmer)


how difficult or easy was for you to change field?


Not bad. I spent a year as a CS major in undergrad and programming is something that I did as a hobby for most of college and grad school, so even without a degree, I had a pretty decent resume for entry-level positions.


My favorite:

"But we never hear about the people who’ve been hurt – like all the students at places like Harvard and Stanford who no longer have better access to the scientific literature than hoi poloi at lesser institutions."


It's not. If it were, it wouldn't be called "training".


I don't think it has much to do with unionization at all so much as that there is generally an overabundance of students applying to graduate school. Combined with the fact that the NIH/NSF more or less set the wages anyway, there really isn't anywhere for a union to lean. After all, unless you could organize a strike of a significant portion of the graduate student populace in the US, I doubt Congress or the NIH/NSF will take any notice.


Overabundance is definitely an issue, and one can indeed argue that in the biomedical sciences wages are set or guided independent of institution, and therefore similar work could expected from trainees. However, in the humanities (and whenever there's a teaching load involved), anecdotally it seems more ripe for abuse--the work you do in TAing a class may not at all benefit your future career but is just required of you.

That being said, the overabundance itself can also be a need for unionization after a fashion: can organized labor influence the number of new students to reverse the trend? Not to mention the general lack of increases in quality of life: wage levels of graduate students have been flat for decades (don't have a graph to point to, but it's in http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-Stephan...).


Caffeine also potentiates the effects of OTC painkillers

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2012456


Also, they are using ALSA instead of PulseAudio. In my experience, the latter deals with multiple sources much better, to the point that I can even route and combine sources for streaming.


Yeah, but remember there are far more grad students obtaining PhD's than faculty positions - in other words, sure, not many who make it to faculty leave, but far more people leave than stay overall.


The fact that 10x as many people train to be scientists as those who become scientists only shows how attractive academia careers are. I like to compare this to sports. Only three people in the world get an Olympic medal once every four years in each discipline, while everyone else spends most of their childhood and youth in arduous training with nothing to show for it.


That only makes sense if you hold the "supply" of scientist jobs constant. What we've actually observed is that:

1) Scientist jobs are high-status, you're right, and permanent positions usually come with a comfortable (though rarely really flush) salary and other upper-middle class perks.

However:

2) The number of available permanent jobs as a scientist has been trending down for reasons that have nothing to do with the number of people willing to do those jobs. Basically, research funding has been dropping like a rock.

3) The "professor -> undergrads -> grad-students -> post-docs -> new professor" career model is structurally senseless. There's nothing wrong with having a severe filter on the number of undergrads who become grad-students (in the sense that there have traditionally been many fields where most of the undergrads can get a job that applies their undergrad-level education), but you simply can't set up the entire science career on the basis of an exponential increase in workers without an exponential increase in jobs. The system only even works for computer-scientist types because most of our PhD grads leave academia by default to get applied research or high-level development jobs in industry.

Now, I'm not going to be a pure-academia wanker and say, "Nobody should get a job in industry EVAR!", but neither is it all right to say, "Everyone should just get a job in industry after grad-school!". Companies simply don't want that many PhDs in most fields.

Also, the oversupply of PhD labor and overspecialization thereof in most fields has enabled many universities to shift to a teaching model in which 2/3 of teaching staff are adjuncts without livable salaries, fringe benefits, or any contract for permanent employment.

As much as I really, really like what academia and research are supposed to stand for (and I say this as I current graduate student), I can't give any kind of endorsement to the career model involved. Not while I'm earning approximately $1400/month after taxes as an "entry-level academic" (ie: grad-student) and a friend of mine (whom I decline to name here) with a fairly close skill-level to me earns something like five times that (again, after taxes) working for a major Silicon Valley company.

Hell, I earned three times that much money interning at a Silicon Valley company over the summer! I wasn't even entry-level in industry, and yet I made more than I do in academia and had a clearer, more secure career path in front of me.

The thing I'm thankful for is that we're a bit less "ideological" about the industry-versus-academia split here in Israel. Professorial jobs have never been very well-paid here, so alternating between industry and academia throughout one's career is just considered normal. Oh, and of course the fact that my health insurance and pension funds aren't tied to just one job :-p.


True, but don't you think it's a dumbbell distribution? A lot of the smartest PhDs who don't land the top academic jobs decide that going to a less academically challenging school is not worth their while? So a lot of them are not leaving in disgust, they're being pulled by better things ...


Bingo.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." - Einstein


Abstracting away the messiness of classes in JS is justification enough for CS, IMHO.

Also, to use your above example, I agree understanding that style of JS is important, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use the tool.


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