I only knew him rather briefly, towards the end of his career. But my impression was this: Dijkstra was a clever guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time. He was there when computer science was just taking off, he loved puzzles, and "voila" he was in. The fact that his ideas were largely unrealistic and unpractical has to do with him being a "puzzler" at heart.
Just install two partitions, and hide the "working" partition from the "games" partition. You can do this most simply by removing the drive-letter assignment in the disk manager.
I have done this for my wife, who wanted to get Mass Effect. The problem is: it's a pain having to reboot every time you want to switch between playing and working.
35-year life span? Pull the other one, it's got bells on. A ten-year life span is more realistic, but they can't say that. The sad fact is that solar panels for electrical generation do not yet make very much sense, unless you are off-grid and have no choice.
Writing good code is expensive. Even if you have a really good team, getting that kind of abstraction and platform independence will at least triple the cost of development. And for what? The client uses windows, the competition will bid 1/3 of your price (or less), you lose the contract, end. Unless you are either working on a research project, or you are in an internal IT unit with unusual freedom, you aren't going to have the opportunity.
Worse, far worse: the vast majority of programmers can't do it. I have taught or worked with hundreds of programmers by now, and my numbers haven't changed in decades:
10% are good - they can write that kind of abstract code.
20% are acceptable - if they are supervised by a good programmer, they can work with abstract code, but they can't design it themselves.
70% are in the wrong film, and shouldn't be allowed near a compiler. But because they can't think abstractly, they have no idea why you think they are hopeless - it's like discussing colors with someone blind from birth. Worse, the company hired them, they've worked there longer than you have, management knows nothing about programming and doesn't understand the issue.
Good luck with your abstract, platform independent applications.
"Top flight developers producing quality code don't need large QA departments."
This comment has already gotten nailed, but I'll just add: show me a company that only has "top flight" developers. In my experience, 10% are "top flight", 20% are fine and 70% should go do something else. You may have the good fortune to work for a company with better numbers, but the last number is never zero...
If (a) global warming is actually happening (b) CO2 is the cause, then there are still two things to consider:
A warmer planet is good. They didn't call it the Medieval Climate Optimum for nothing. A warmer climate leads to more arable land and longer growing seasons.
CO2 is good - it is the world's best fertilizer. The increase in CO2 levels has increased crop yields up to 30% (depending on the specific crop and local climate).
Of course, all recent evidence points to warming having ended, and having been due to natural climate variability and/or solar cycles.
Many Swiss companies are international, and use English internally. This includes the big banks (UBS, Credit Suisse), the pharma industry (Roche, Novartis), and many others. If a company decides they want you, they will take care of the work permit.
It really is a problem! I ride a bicycle to work, and was nearly nailed by an electric car yesterday. I was looking ahead at an intersection, and had to swerve around a car that was trying to parallel park. I had no idea I was being overtaken by a car...
The problem may not be that they are to quiet on an absolute scale, but that they are too quiet comparatively: their sound is drowned out by all the gasoline and diesel engines.
Of course, one should look, not just listen. But electric cars are still so rare that many (most?) people rely at least occasionally on their ears.
Like many of you, I've been following the IPv4 vs. IPv6 story from the beginning. The fact that adoption is proving so difficult is the practical proof of one and only one thing: the IPv6 standard is a mess. The single biggest problem is the lack of backwards compatibility, both on the wire and in text. IPv4 addresses should - and must - be a valid subset of whatever succeeds it.
The best thing that could happen would be for the IT world to "get over" IPv6 and throw it out as a hare-brained, ivory tower failure. Start over andreate a new successor that is backwards compatible - there will be essentially no adoption problems.
Take Sins of a Solar Empire, for example. there's practically no drm. you don't even need the cd to play. But the company that's made it has earned a lot of trust and respect which will be rewarded when they produce the sequel.
Bingo! Sins of a Solar Empire is the first game I've bought since Civ IV. There have been several games I was interested in, but this one I bought - precisely because it has no copy protection. I can play it on a laptop on the road, I can let my kids give it a try on their computers, etc.
FWIW I haven't pirated any games either - cracked copies have their own problems - so I'm not the type of person he is addressing. But I am is target audience - someone who likes games and has the disposable income. The bottom-line: make it easy: no copy protection, no CD-check, etc. Life is to short to put up with crap...
I live and work in Europe and am very glad of speaking the local language. Whether or not this is for you depends hugely on your motivations.
If you plan to work for US-based companies, there's really not much point.
If you plan on only short stays in other countries, there's still not much point. Numerous European companies have declared English to be their official internal language, because it is the one common language spoken by just about everyone.
However, if you ever think you might want to live in another country for the long-term, then it is well worth learning the language! Otherwise, you are locked out of the local culture. People who have never learned the local language can only really socialize with other people in the same situation. Both the locals and "integrated" expats want little to do with them outside of the office. If you're just here for a couple of years, no big deal. But if you expect to build a life here, the local language is essential!
If you do want to learn a language, do realize that it's a lot of work. After a year or two of classes, you have got to go live where it's spoken. Use the language day after day, for everything. It's hard and frustrating at first, but well worth the payoff in the end!
First off, these people don't do themselves any favours with descriptions like this:
"No data stored or transferred in OFF is copyrighted because all data is random..."
and
"...the randomized blocks do not represent the original data inserted to begin with"
Of course the data is not random. And of course it represents the original data. If either of these two nonsensical statements were true, then it would be impossible to reconstruct the original data. They may randomly generate the blocks, but the selection of blocks and parts of blocks to represent data is anything but random. What they mean is that the distrubution across many blocks in complex relationships means that a happenstance collection of blocks alone is not of any use in reconstructing the content. Sure, private storage of copyrighted data would be acceptable in this sort of encoded, distributed format. But if you publish the URL required to decode the content, you will be every bit as much in violation of copyright law as with any other form of file-sharing.
In the end, the only possible response to this technology is "so what?". If you want online storage, you can buy it by the terabyte from Amazon S3, or for that matter from your ISP. If you want P2P, this is no better than BitTorrent - and at first glance not nearly as robust.
Plus: how many people are going to be willing to put their extra disk-space permanently online, and drill a hole in their firewall so that the world can access it? Heck, I don't even do things like Seti-Online anymore - even if I trust the application, it's extra work that I just don't have time for.
I work as both an IT-manager and I teach technical courses at the college-level - and have for a couple of decades now.
Over the years I have noted one absolute constant. In any class of technical students, somewhere between 10% and 20% would actually be worth hiring. It is possible to do homework and pass exams, and still be useless in a technical job. The typical program written for a course is at most a few hundred lines. A student who struggles to make such a program work will have no chance when asked to work on part of a system consisting of millions of lines. The level of complexity and abstraction is completely different.
The other 80% to 90% of the students will either move into supporting fields such as customer support or quality assurance, or will eventually change fields altogether. There's nothing wrong with that - a good QA person is also hard to find. But they won't be writing software.
So, sure, surveys say the schools are turning out plenty of graduates. But any IT manager knows there's a big difference between a theoretically qualified graduate and someone who can really do the job.
Slashdot Mirror
I only knew him rather briefly, towards the end of his career. But my impression was this: Dijkstra was a clever guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time. He was there when computer science was just taking off, he loved puzzles, and "voila" he was in. The fact that his ideas were largely unrealistic and unpractical has to do with him being a "puzzler" at heart.
Why not come up with a fresh idea? Spend your time coding instead of in court.
I have done this for my wife, who wanted to get Mass Effect. The problem is: it's a pain having to reboot every time you want to switch between playing and working.
35-year life span? Pull the other one, it's got bells on. A ten-year life span is more realistic, but they can't say that. The sad fact is that solar panels for electrical generation do not yet make very much sense, unless you are off-grid and have no choice.
Good luck with your abstract, platform independent applications.
This comment has already gotten nailed, but I'll just add: show me a company that only has "top flight" developers. In my experience, 10% are "top flight", 20% are fine and 70% should go do something else. You may have the good fortune to work for a company with better numbers, but the last number is never zero...
If (a) global warming is actually happening (b) CO2 is the cause, then there are still two things to consider:
Of course, all recent evidence points to warming having ended, and having been due to natural climate variability and/or solar cycles.
Many Swiss companies are international, and use English internally. This includes the big banks (UBS, Credit Suisse), the pharma industry (Roche, Novartis), and many others. If a company decides they want you, they will take care of the work permit.
It really is a problem! I ride a bicycle to work, and was nearly nailed by an electric car yesterday. I was looking ahead at an intersection, and had to swerve around a car that was trying to parallel park. I had no idea I was being overtaken by a car...
The problem may not be that they are to quiet on an absolute scale, but that they are too quiet comparatively: their sound is drowned out by all the gasoline and diesel engines.
Of course, one should look, not just listen. But electric cars are still so rare that many (most?) people rely at least occasionally on their ears.
Like many of you, I've been following the IPv4 vs. IPv6 story from the beginning. The fact that adoption is proving so difficult is the practical proof of one and only one thing: the IPv6 standard is a mess. The single biggest problem is the lack of backwards compatibility, both on the wire and in text. IPv4 addresses should - and must - be a valid subset of whatever succeeds it. The best thing that could happen would be for the IT world to "get over" IPv6 and throw it out as a hare-brained, ivory tower failure. Start over andreate a new successor that is backwards compatible - there will be essentially no adoption problems.
Bingo! Sins of a Solar Empire is the first game I've bought since Civ IV. There have been several games I was interested in, but this one I bought - precisely because it has no copy protection. I can play it on a laptop on the road, I can let my kids give it a try on their computers, etc. FWIW I haven't pirated any games either - cracked copies have their own problems - so I'm not the type of person he is addressing. But I am is target audience - someone who likes games and has the disposable income. The bottom-line: make it easy: no copy protection, no CD-check, etc. Life is to short to put up with crap...
If you do want to learn a language, do realize that it's a lot of work. After a year or two of classes, you have got to go live where it's spoken. Use the language day after day, for everything. It's hard and frustrating at first, but well worth the payoff in the end!
First off, these people don't do themselves any favours with descriptions like this:
"No data stored or transferred in OFF is copyrighted because all data is random..."
and
"...the randomized blocks do not represent the original data inserted to begin with"
Of course the data is not random. And of course it represents the original data. If either of these two nonsensical statements were true, then it would be impossible to reconstruct the original data. They may randomly generate the blocks, but the selection of blocks and parts of blocks to represent data is anything but random. What they mean is that the distrubution across many blocks in complex relationships means that a happenstance collection of blocks alone is not of any use in reconstructing the content. Sure, private storage of copyrighted data would be acceptable in this sort of encoded, distributed format. But if you publish the URL required to decode the content, you will be every bit as much in violation of copyright law as with any other form of file-sharing.
In the end, the only possible response to this technology is "so what?". If you want online storage, you can buy it by the terabyte from Amazon S3, or for that matter from your ISP. If you want P2P, this is no better than BitTorrent - and at first glance not nearly as robust.
Plus: how many people are going to be willing to put their extra disk-space permanently online, and drill a hole in their firewall so that the world can access it? Heck, I don't even do things like Seti-Online anymore - even if I trust the application, it's extra work that I just don't have time for.
I work as both an IT-manager and I teach technical courses at the college-level - and have for a couple of decades now.
Over the years I have noted one absolute constant. In any class of technical students, somewhere between 10% and 20% would actually be worth hiring. It is possible to do homework and pass exams, and still be useless in a technical job. The typical program written for a course is at most a few hundred lines. A student who struggles to make such a program work will have no chance when asked to work on part of a system consisting of millions of lines. The level of complexity and abstraction is completely different.
The other 80% to 90% of the students will either move into supporting fields such as customer support or quality assurance, or will eventually change fields altogether. There's nothing wrong with that - a good QA person is also hard to find. But they won't be writing software.
So, sure, surveys say the schools are turning out plenty of graduates. But any IT manager knows there's a big difference between a theoretically qualified graduate and someone who can really do the job.