Isn't there some major case going on, or one settled recently, involving this? I know the recording/movie industries wanted to revoke first sale on CDs/DVDs, so maybe I'm confusing it with that, but I thought there was one involving software licensing too.
Yeah, some IT outsourcing is happening, but after a while I think it'll slack back off. I've talked to several people about IT--courtesy those assumptions that "computer scientist" = "IT specialist"--who say IT outsourcing is frustrating and ultimately inefficient for their companies. One woman in particular complained that their main corporate office was in NYC, but all of their tech support was at the time (sometime in 2003 or 04) based somewhere in India. Evidently, they weren't making the IT guys work a schedule compatible with any of the American offices, and also didn't check for a sufficient command of English, so it was next to impossible to get any useful help in a timely manner.
There was a static analysis tool, whose name escapes me, that was based on looking for weird code patterns (like initializing a variable twice without any intervening uses). The idea was that certain things, while not bugs on their own, generally indicated a lack of understanding on the programmer's part and so going back to look at these sections of code tended to bring out other bugs. Same idea, I guess... fixing things that aren't necessarily bugs exposes things that are.
You: "There's obviously a problem with a study that takes 8GB of data and concludes that there's no difference in quality between kernels with legendary uptimes and those that can't manage memory well enough to stay up more than a few weeks."
From the summary: "The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization."
These have no direct correlation to uptime. Yes, indirect, perhaps, as in "a better-organized kernel is easier to understand, debug, and reason about", but not direct as in "implementing the scheduler in 3 files instead of one guarantees stability."
That said, what defines this as an interesting but impractical study? Doesn't it say something that there's something more fundamental than just high-level software engineering principles at work in the relative qualities of kernels?
I graduated from the University of Richmond (the other UR), a liberal arts school with a very small CS department. I think my year, there were 14 majors, but just a couple years down the road they were down to 4 or 5. The only reason a small department matters is in the course availability--at UR, there were several classes that were offered every other year at best, and some of those were canned due to lack of enrollment. On the other hand, a small department means you'll probably know all of your professors decently well, and generally somebody will probably be willing to let you do an independent study course in some topic you're interested in that they would normally teach.
A liberal arts school is just like a tech school in that it's really what you make of it. Coming into grad school, in terms of breadth of knowledge I had a leg up on a lot of the people (at least the American students, maybe not the Asians...) just because I'd taken pretty much every course I could. If there are skills you're worried you're not getting, or not getting early enough, be proactive and learn them yourself.
And don't worry about the paper writing, you'll learn your first semester how to BS liberal arts papers;p
>Today, the people that are buying music must be the ones with dial-up Internet connections and are still playing CDs on portable devices. The folks with the 3 or 4 three-inch binders of CDs in their car. Maybe a few people with 8-track players or something. They don't have the opportunity to download music, so they have no choice but to buy and get gifts from their friends that are downloading. > >Come on, do you know anyone that would actually pay for music today? Someone that uses the Internet? Naa, I didn't think so.
I've had broadband at school and home for the last 7 years, and almost only ever listen to music either on my computers or Zune, but I still buy a couple CDs a month. Sure, a lot of them are used (local shops or Amazon marketplace), but I also pick up a decent number of CDs on release day. "But why?" I like having a display, I like the art, I like the liner notes... and also, there's virtually no effort involved in getting the music into whatever format I want. Screw this "oh, you can have your file, but you have have keep looking for programs to strip the DRM, and you better hope your hard disk doesn't crash or that your backup CD-R doesn't fail, and you better not want to play it on more than 3 devices."
Right now, if CDs were to go the way of the dodo, I think there'd be more problems than people realize/would admit.
I remember something like this happening on a test I was grading a couple years ago, we flagged a whole pile of tests for having some...very peculiar wording describing an error condition. We set them all aside to double-check, then discovered that one of the instructors had used that wording on the slide and everybody had apparently memorized it.
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Isn't there some major case going on, or one settled recently, involving this? I know the recording/movie industries wanted to revoke first sale on CDs/DVDs, so maybe I'm confusing it with that, but I thought there was one involving software licensing too.
Yeah, some IT outsourcing is happening, but after a while I think it'll slack back off. I've talked to several people about IT--courtesy those assumptions that "computer scientist" = "IT specialist"--who say IT outsourcing is frustrating and ultimately inefficient for their companies. One woman in particular complained that their main corporate office was in NYC, but all of their tech support was at the time (sometime in 2003 or 04) based somewhere in India. Evidently, they weren't making the IT guys work a schedule compatible with any of the American offices, and also didn't check for a sufficient command of English, so it was next to impossible to get any useful help in a timely manner.
There was a static analysis tool, whose name escapes me, that was based on looking for weird code patterns (like initializing a variable twice without any intervening uses). The idea was that certain things, while not bugs on their own, generally indicated a lack of understanding on the programmer's part and so going back to look at these sections of code tended to bring out other bugs. Same idea, I guess... fixing things that aren't necessarily bugs exposes things that are.
Ahh... yeah, I did look at his profile and notice pretty much all of his replies were scored -1.
You: "There's obviously a problem with a study that takes 8GB of data and concludes that there's no difference in quality between kernels with legendary uptimes and those that can't manage memory well enough to stay up more than a few weeks." From the summary: "The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization." These have no direct correlation to uptime. Yes, indirect, perhaps, as in "a better-organized kernel is easier to understand, debug, and reason about", but not direct as in "implementing the scheduler in 3 files instead of one guarantees stability." That said, what defines this as an interesting but impractical study? Doesn't it say something that there's something more fundamental than just high-level software engineering principles at work in the relative qualities of kernels?
I graduated from the University of Richmond (the other UR), a liberal arts school with a very small CS department. I think my year, there were 14 majors, but just a couple years down the road they were down to 4 or 5. The only reason a small department matters is in the course availability--at UR, there were several classes that were offered every other year at best, and some of those were canned due to lack of enrollment. On the other hand, a small department means you'll probably know all of your professors decently well, and generally somebody will probably be willing to let you do an independent study course in some topic you're interested in that they would normally teach.
;p
A liberal arts school is just like a tech school in that it's really what you make of it. Coming into grad school, in terms of breadth of knowledge I had a leg up on a lot of the people (at least the American students, maybe not the Asians...) just because I'd taken pretty much every course I could. If there are skills you're worried you're not getting, or not getting early enough, be proactive and learn them yourself.
And don't worry about the paper writing, you'll learn your first semester how to BS liberal arts papers
>Today, the people that are buying music must be the ones with dial-up Internet connections and are still playing CDs on portable devices. The folks with the 3 or 4 three-inch binders of CDs in their car. Maybe a few people with 8-track players or something. They don't have the opportunity to download music, so they have no choice but to buy and get gifts from their friends that are downloading.
>
>Come on, do you know anyone that would actually pay for music today? Someone that uses the Internet? Naa, I didn't think so.
I've had broadband at school and home for the last 7 years, and almost only ever listen to music either on my computers or Zune, but I still buy a couple CDs a month. Sure, a lot of them are used (local shops or Amazon marketplace), but I also pick up a decent number of CDs on release day. "But why?" I like having a display, I like the art, I like the liner notes... and also, there's virtually no effort involved in getting the music into whatever format I want. Screw this "oh, you can have your file, but you have have keep looking for programs to strip the DRM, and you better hope your hard disk doesn't crash or that your backup CD-R doesn't fail, and you better not want to play it on more than 3 devices."
Right now, if CDs were to go the way of the dodo, I think there'd be more problems than people realize/would admit.
I remember something like this happening on a test I was grading a couple years ago, we flagged a whole pile of tests for having some...very peculiar wording describing an error condition. We set them all aside to double-check, then discovered that one of the instructors had used that wording on the slide and everybody had apparently memorized it.