Obama cancels the plans to return to the moon and about a month later vast quantities of water are suddenly discovered on the moon. I used to work for NASA and while I don't think they would lie, the possibility of water on the moon may have gotten blown out of proportion into there are tons of water on the moon to support someone's funding.
I may be somewhat biased since I have a BS and MS in Computer Science. Computer Science gives you a good foundation to understanding what is going on behind the scenes. More understanding is better. There are libraries and built in functions for just about everything these days which anybody can use, but you are better able to diagnose problems when something goes wrong if you have a deeper understanding of how they work.
A recent CS grad and a self taught developer with 4 years of experience are not at the same level. The self taught person is generally going to be better at writing applications. However, in the long run a person with a CS degree will surpass the self taught person. This of course assumes equal levels of talent. About 10% of developers are just better than the rest by an order of magnitude or more.
I learned a lot in school that isn’t particularly useful for my job. For instance, no one has asked me to write an application to solve differential equations. I did have to write a quick sort in basic when I first graduated. I also ran into an issue recently where a client had some equations they wanted coded into an application for reporting. I had a self taught developer who just looked at it and had no clue. I coded the equations into a function for him so he could finish the report.
Religion has been on the decline in the United Statues for several decades. At the same time the perception is that the US research has declined over the same period. Religion in Asia is on a sharp upswing and is all but dead in Europe. I'm not seeing a correlation between religion and research.
Research into solar and wind is good. However, how much money has been wasted on a problem that is not well understood?
IANAL and IANAG (I am not a geneticist). However my wife works for Genbank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/). She is a geneticist and we've discussed this issue. When a company patents a gene they have the rights to information and usage of that gene. This essentially halts research on the gene, because anything you discover is owned by the company with the patent unless you work out some type of licensing agreement. This is bad for medical research because a company won't study a disease if the gene is owned by another company. Any cure or medication they came up would not be usable without licensing. Considering the high cost of medical research, it's just not worth it do research unless you own the patent. Companies are in the process of patenting every gene they can find in hopes that one of them will be important for instance the genes described in this article that relate to breast cancer.
I'll second that. I'd be wary of research coming out of China. My wife works for NIH at the National Library Medicine. They funnel genetic research from China into a database called TP. They have nicnamed it the toliet paper database because it's full of crap.
And hopefully someday people will realize they are Just Plain Wrong about the existence of God, but unfortunately that's not as easily proven beyond a reasonable doubt as evolution. ------
Unless you've been conducting some unpublished research there is no proof for evolution. It is a theory. Not a theory as in the theory of gravity. You can conduct independent repeatable experiments to back up your theory that bodies with mass attract each other. There have been no experiments much less independent repeatable experiments showing evolution. Natural selection leads to evolution is simply our best hypothesis at the moment.
Because it wasn't. The first hypertext system was the Hypertext Editing System created in 1967. The first graphical browser with point and click interface was the NLS system which was part of the Augment project created in 1968 by Doug Engelbart. There weren't any point and click inteface before then because he also created the mouse as part of that project.
It seems like people are missing the point. Yes there are many clients available to download your email to your local machine. The important part is that you now have a client that blurs the lines between desktop applications and web based applications. Yes I know it's been done before, but not in an application as ubiquitous as Gmail. Occasionally connected applications like this are a step to all those buzz words people keep throwing around like cloud computing and death of the desktop.
My forefathers came here to live and become citizens, not work a few years and leave. I know that's not the case for all H1Bs many do stay and become US citizens, but most do not.
I've worked with many H1Bs over the years. I'm a contractor in the DC area and they are very popular with government contractors. The government won't convert H1Bs to full time employees so the contractors get a continuous stream of revenue. Many H1Bs are treated like indentured servants. You cram 10 people into a two bedroom apartment and pay them a third to half of what they US counterparts are making. I agree with one of the original posters. If it really is about a lack of qualified people they should require salary parity for H1B workers.
My father was enlisted military, for those not familiar with the mililitary that means he was not an officer. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. I went to college and worked part time. I racked up student loans that took me 10 years to pay off. I worked full time and paid my way through graduate school. I started a couple companies working 70-80 a week to get both going. I sold one a couple years ago for couple million dollars and the other one is doing quite well.
My brother dropped out of high school. He started doing drugs, screwed around for many years, and married a crazy woman he eventually divorced. He does construction work now is barely able to make his rent payment every month.
The disparency appears to be somewhat self created. I know I am the exception. No one I went to college with is doing as well as I am financially, but they are not doing bad either. They live comfortable lives.
The 5% figure sounds reasonable. Microsoft isn't just windows. It is the Microsoft Office Suite, SQL Server, Visual Studio,.Net and a whole host of other software packages. If you wanted to get an open source "ecosystem" value equivalent to Microsoft you would have to include several other open source projects like Open Office, MySQL, Eclipse, Java, J2EE, and many others.
It is absolutely reasonable. We always test our technical people. I wrote a short requirements list to write CRUD methods for users with an ERD. You have an hour to write code that lists the users, add, edit, and deletes them in whatever language we happen to be interviewing for. I don't care if it works, you can have syntax errors and bugs and you don't have to finish. I just want to know if you can put an appication together from a set of requirements. I've had people with a CS degree and 10 years of Java experience produce nothing at the end of an hour. I also had one guy a year out of high school produce a working application using XML as a data store.
If it makes you feel any better we also test sales people and accountants. Our CFO has a CPA, but he had to take a basic accounting test. You'd be surprised how many CPAs do badly on that test. You reach a point in accounting where it's all analytical and you can't do basic accounting any longer. The sales test is probably the most difficult. You are given a description of our company, a briefing of the company to contact and a phone number. When you are ready you call the number. Either the CEO or the VP of sales is on the other end. They play a difficult client and you must sell them. There are usually several people sitting around the room listening to the conversation on speaker. Then they rate you.
Slashdot Mirror
In a telpathic society where you can trust everyone, you don't need a virus scanner on your computer system.
Obama cancels the plans to return to the moon and about a month later vast quantities of water are suddenly discovered on the moon. I used to work for NASA and while I don't think they would lie, the possibility of water on the moon may have gotten blown out of proportion into there are tons of water on the moon to support someone's funding.
I may be somewhat biased since I have a BS and MS in Computer Science. Computer Science gives you a good foundation to understanding what is going on behind the scenes. More understanding is better. There are libraries and built in functions for just about everything these days which anybody can use, but you are better able to diagnose problems when something goes wrong if you have a deeper understanding of how they work.
A recent CS grad and a self taught developer with 4 years of experience are not at the same level. The self taught person is generally going to be better at writing applications. However, in the long run a person with a CS degree will surpass the self taught person. This of course assumes equal levels of talent. About 10% of developers are just better than the rest by an order of magnitude or more.
I learned a lot in school that isn’t particularly useful for my job. For instance, no one has asked me to write an application to solve differential equations. I did have to write a quick sort in basic when I first graduated. I also ran into an issue recently where a client had some equations they wanted coded into an application for reporting. I had a self taught developer who just looked at it and had no clue. I coded the equations into a function for him so he could finish the report.
Religion has been on the decline in the United Statues for several decades. At the same time the perception is that the US research has declined over the same period. Religion in Asia is on a sharp upswing and is all but dead in Europe. I'm not seeing a correlation between religion and research.
Research into solar and wind is good. However, how much money has been wasted on a problem that is not well understood?
How about a 500 word math problem? It makes more sense as an entrance criteria for MIT than creative writing.
IANAL and IANAG (I am not a geneticist). However my wife works for Genbank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/). She is a geneticist and we've discussed this issue. When a company patents a gene they have the rights to information and usage of that gene. This essentially halts research on the gene, because anything you discover is owned by the company with the patent unless you work out some type of licensing agreement. This is bad for medical research because a company won't study a disease if the gene is owned by another company. Any cure or medication they came up would not be usable without licensing. Considering the high cost of medical research, it's just not worth it do research unless you own the patent. Companies are in the process of patenting every gene they can find in hopes that one of them will be important for instance the genes described in this article that relate to breast cancer.
I'll second that. I'd be wary of research coming out of China. My wife works for NIH at the National Library Medicine. They funnel genetic research from China into a database called TP. They have nicnamed it the toliet paper database because it's full of crap.
The moderator class is over powered. I'm a 60 level poster and a first level moderator can pown my post.
And hopefully someday people will realize they are Just Plain Wrong about the existence of God, but unfortunately that's not as easily proven beyond a reasonable doubt as evolution.
------
Unless you've been conducting some unpublished research there is no proof for evolution. It is a theory. Not a theory as in the theory of gravity. You can conduct independent repeatable experiments to back up your theory that bodies with mass attract each other. There have been no experiments much less independent repeatable experiments showing evolution. Natural selection leads to evolution is simply our best hypothesis at the moment.
Because it wasn't. The first hypertext system was the Hypertext Editing System created in 1967. The first graphical browser with point and click interface was the NLS system which was part of the Augment project created in 1968 by Doug Engelbart. There weren't any point and click inteface before then because he also created the mouse as part of that project.
It seems like people are missing the point. Yes there are many clients available to download your email to your local machine. The important part is that you now have a client that blurs the lines between desktop applications and web based applications. Yes I know it's been done before, but not in an application as ubiquitous as Gmail. Occasionally connected applications like this are a step to all those buzz words people keep throwing around like cloud computing and death of the desktop.
My forefathers came here to live and become citizens, not work a few years and leave. I know that's not the case for all H1Bs many do stay and become US citizens, but most do not.
I've worked with many H1Bs over the years. I'm a contractor in the DC area and they are very popular with government contractors. The government won't convert H1Bs to full time employees so the contractors get a continuous stream of revenue. Many H1Bs are treated like indentured servants. You cram 10 people into a two bedroom apartment and pay them a third to half of what they US counterparts are making. I agree with one of the original posters. If it really is about a lack of qualified people they should require salary parity for H1B workers.
When I first read it I was thinking it said you work 80 hours every 9 days including weekends which sounds more like my work schedule.
People say that, but what does it mean?
My father was enlisted military, for those not familiar with the mililitary that means he was not an officer. Neither of my parents graduated from high school. I went to college and worked part time. I racked up student loans that took me 10 years to pay off. I worked full time and paid my way through graduate school. I started a couple companies working 70-80 a week to get both going. I sold one a couple years ago for couple million dollars and the other one is doing quite well.
My brother dropped out of high school. He started doing drugs, screwed around for many years, and married a crazy woman he eventually divorced. He does construction work now is barely able to make his rent payment every month.
The disparency appears to be somewhat self created. I know I am the exception. No one I went to college with is doing as well as I am financially, but they are not doing bad either. They live comfortable lives.
The 5% figure sounds reasonable. Microsoft isn't just windows. It is the Microsoft Office Suite, SQL Server, Visual Studio, .Net and a whole host of other software packages. If you wanted to get an open source "ecosystem" value equivalent to Microsoft you would have to include several other open source projects like Open Office, MySQL, Eclipse, Java, J2EE, and many others.
It is absolutely reasonable. We always test our technical people. I wrote a short requirements list to write CRUD methods for users with an ERD. You have an hour to write code that lists the users, add, edit, and deletes them in whatever language we happen to be interviewing for. I don't care if it works, you can have syntax errors and bugs and you don't have to finish. I just want to know if you can put an appication together from a set of requirements. I've had people with a CS degree and 10 years of Java experience produce nothing at the end of an hour. I also had one guy a year out of high school produce a working application using XML as a data store.
If it makes you feel any better we also test sales people and accountants. Our CFO has a CPA, but he had to take a basic accounting test. You'd be surprised how many CPAs do badly on that test. You reach a point in accounting where it's all analytical and you can't do basic accounting any longer. The sales test is probably the most difficult. You are given a description of our company, a briefing of the company to contact and a phone number. When you are ready you call the number. Either the CEO or the VP of sales is on the other end. They play a difficult client and you must sell them. There are usually several people sitting around the room listening to the conversation on speaker. Then they rate you.