I rather doubt that the contract explicitly authorizes them to enforce the contract by the means of forging communications from you or to you. If they really feel it's a violation of contract, they can cut off your connection to their network, but I really doubt it's legal for them to use forgery as a method of enforcement.
The problem is that you're going to start seeing shortages of professionals in certain fields in the US. When there's a shortage of good programmers we programmers think that's a great idea because it means our salary goes up, but when there's a severe shortage of pharmacists or obstetricians, that's more of a problem.
I worked for a small medical university a few years ago, and it also had a very high percentage of foreign students. Why? The answer is simple: they could afford it. With tuition over $45,000 a year, few Americans can just cough up that kind of cash. On the other hand, there's a whole world out there to search for people who want to go to medical school and can afford it and qualify to get in.
If the US wants to continue to have high numbers of qualified professionals available to fill societal needs, we're going to have to start doing something about cost of education.
I did some fairly extensive work with google maps, and I can say that their API is very well documented.
Personally, I wrote a local API for it in the language I'm working in, Water, and let Water deal with all the Google stuff for me. By mixing Water's AJAX features with Google's map API, I was able to create a fully AJAX enabled map API which notifies the server about every user action on the map, including clicking, dragging, etc, and deals with user initiated actions in an object oriented manner (for example, if a user clicks on a pin point on the map in the browser, it fires an event in the corresponding place object in the server). I also created an interface to KML, the language which was used by Google Earth and which is sometimes used by google maps now. KML is also well documented. I linked that into our place objects as well, so you can easily get a google map or some kml for any place object. KML is also useful because some other commercial mapping products are now starting to use KML as well.
I certainly wouldn't have been able to do all this without excellent documentation and a rich API from Google. Thanks to them providing both, the implementation went quickly and easily, and now Water has a fabulous map API thanks to Google making it all easy. And yes, I do have a clue what some of the alternatives are: prior to doing the implementation with Google Maps, I did another implementation using government services. (Actually, both are just subclasses of our abstract cartographer class, so it's a very direct comparison.) Google offered a much richer and easier API.
I did look at some other online mapping services, and if they offered an API, I found them to be more limited.
I can't comment on the Microsoft API or documentation, I haven't tried them.
I am a man. I've worked in a variety of companies from Fortune 100 companies to tiny 6 person startups over the years. In these various positions I've worked with quite a few women, sometimes as my peers, sometimes as my direct reports, sometimes as my manager. I've hired both men and women, and been happy with the performance of everyone I hired.
The only aspect of working with women that has bothered me is that most of these women have simply assumed that any disagreement I had with them or problem in our working relationship resulted from sexism. Some complained to me about it. Others complained to my employer and tried to get me fired without bothering to speak with me first.
The reality is, I treat women on the job the same way as I treat men on the job: I try to be friendly and professional, I point out mistakes when I see them, I get grouchy sometimes when I didn't get enough sleep, I complain when I think I've been mistreated, I apologize when I realize I should, and whenever possible I try to help everyone around me do their best, excel at their work, and if possible get promoted. But when I'm having a hard time with a guy, either he puts up with it or he complains to me about it... when I'm having a hard time with a woman, she usually either tells me I'm sexist or tells my boss I'm sexist.
It really offends me. All my life I've been surrounded by strong women who were great role models. In college, most of my computer science professors were women, as was the dean of computer science, so women taught me my job. Several of the most disciplined, constructive, and effective managers I've worked for have been women. I'd have to be an idiot not to recognize that women are just as capable of being effective and creative in the computing fields as any men are. And yet, if I have any difficulty getting along with any woman on the job, she immediately denounces me as that sexist idiot.
Fortunately, in the cases where someone complained to my employer, none of them took it seriously... although in one case it did go so far as my having to offer to produce a list of women who have managed me and/or worked for me who would be willing to vouch for my non-sexism.
After decades of this kind of treatment, I try very hard to continue to treat women at work the same as men at work, but I have to admit I have become wary of the false accusations, and I resent having to have that wariness.
And he would have finished it, if each of his books wasn't 150 pages or so of plot and 450 pages or so of whining about how come she has prettier embroidery on her dress than I have on mine and I'm jealous that she has better furiniture than I do and unending angst over whether or not I should use my powers and whine whine whine complain complain moan whine whine. If all his characters weren't such whiny bastards, the series could have been done several books ago.
I agree - and I'd say that what they call a "software engineer" is what most people I've known in the industry call a "senior programmer".
I disagree about government being an avenue to that senior progammer / software engineer job though: industry doesn't like to hire people who don't have industry-specific experience. THEIR industry. If you've done computing in the telecommunications industry all your career and apply for a computing job in the travel industry, they'll give you a hard time about it (or just ignore you) even if you'd actually be doing exactly the same work. Employers just have a hard time realizing that some skills are general purpose.
Most employers also don't really want senior programmers / software engineers, even when they need one. They just don't want to pay for someone senior enough to do that sort of work. Take my word for this: I *am* that sort of software engineer who can do all the requirements gathering and software architecture etc, and my employers have universally strongly praised my skills in those areas, but they have also repeatedly gotten rid of me in favor of someone cheaper. I had one incident where I got my annual review on a friday afternoon in which they told me they were so thrilled with my work that they couldn't possibly be happier and please just keep up the fantastic work, and then at 9am monday morning the HR person was waiting to terminate my employment because they'd decided to go with outsourcing my work because they thought it would be cheaper. (It wasn't, but they did it anyway.) In several cases, as I was being terminated I asked them if they realized that their new plans would result in them getting inferior workmanship and probably slower too, and they told me fairly bluntly that yes, that's fine with them as long as it's cheaper than my salary.
My prediction of what's going to happen to the job market for programmers and senior programmers (or software engineers or whatever you want to call us) is that demand is going to slowly drop, and that it's generally a bad idea to get into this field right now because if you're one of the new guys in programming you're going to be at a significant disadvantage in competing for the smaller number of jobs available, and there's a strong chance that you won't be one of the survivors: you'll end up dropping out of the computing/programming field to do something else for a living, and you may suffer for not having an education in that other field, or worse, you might have to work in IT (aka IS aka MIS), which is presently rated the most hated job in America, largely due to the crappy treatment IT people get from employers. Anyway, this dearth of programming jobs will lead to a dearth of programming students. Then, the old age effect will kick in, as senior people start retiring or moving into management, and it will create a strange sort of vacuum in the field: there won't be many jobs, but there won't be many competent people to fill them either. My guess is that in the long run the situation will stabilize with fewer programming jobs than we've had in the past, but that the qualified people who are able to do them will earn better.
If people are really concerned that he's dead, figure out what town he lives in, call up his local police, tell them the story, and explain that you'd like them to do a "health and welfare check". They'll find him and see if he's alive and/or needs medical attention, or if he's dead. They might even tell you the result.
And then there's clients. A lot of web programming gets done either by a consultancy or at least by a programmer who works for someone who isn't a programmer. When you have non-technical people involved too deeply in the process, dumb things happen.
The article talks about things like how easy the URLs are... I had a client for which my then boss made the mistake of bringing up this topic with them, and they freaked out and spent a week coming up with a new naming scheme that was insanely complex (but they thought it was easy) and made for filenames so long that the version control system couldn't handle them. Then they got really angry with us because we brought the subject up and then "refused" to do what they wanted us to. In many situations such as this, I believe it's in the best interest of all involved for the developer to make a decision about how best to serve the site's audience and go with it, because sometimes gathering the requirements just opens up a huge can of worms unnecessarily.
The article also talks about developers anal-retentively making page layouts that control everything down to the individual pixel level of precision, and then if the slightest thing changes on the page (such as the logo) the page layout has to be substantially reworked to accommodate it. This is not abnormal. Indeed, every Fortune 500 company whose web site I worked on insisted on this level of precision, understood the consequences, and was prepared to pay for the time it would take to do the work that way. I worked out reliable methods to quickly and easily lay out a page with absolute precision, with certain reasonable constraints. Any developer working in that sort of environment does the same.
The article complains about building a site to support a specific browser. While I certainly will be among the first to chew out a programmer who builds a site to only work in one browser to the exclusion of others, I believe that it's normal and good to build it to work in a specific *set* of browsers. It's all well and good to say how standards are important and we should all write standards complaint code, except for the minor detail that none of the actual browsers are truly standards complaint as implemented. Oh sure, some are much better than others, but none are really perfect, so if you want to ensure that your site (or application) is going to actually work, the only way to do so is to code it in a way that copes with the known quirks of the various browsers.
Refactoring is a great thing to do when you need to do it. However, I try to design my software for scalability up front when possible so that I don't have to do a lot of refactoring down the road.
I don't know more polite way to put this, so I'm going to have to say it bluntly: Are you stupid or something?
When a customer gets a phone for $0 with a 3 year contract, they're paying for that phone, in full: it raises the cost of the service. The cell companies are not financially incompetent. If they "give" you a phone, they're going to make sure their rate plan is correspondingly higher to ensure that they recoup that cost. And further, once they have recouped that cost, they're not going to lower the price of your plan - why should they? You're locked into a contract, after all. So you're going to keep paying for that phone, and paying for it, and paying for it, forever, until you replace it or drop the service.
If consumers didn't get phones "free" from their provider, you're right, they'd have to pay for it. And you know what? Hardly anyone justifies a $400 phone purchase. That phone the cell company is "giving" you ISN'T A $400 PHONE. I have a $400 phone. Let me tell you, a $400 phone is a pretty high end phone. It's way nicer than any of the crappy phones my cell provider offers for "free", or even any of the phones they charge for in addition to locking you into a contract. Consumers will still be able to buy a cheap phone if they want to: they're just going to have to wise up and actually save up the money to buy what they want instead of expecting it to fall from the sky as a gift.
And if consumers have to pay for their own phones, they're no longer going to be willing to accept some of the high prices and unreasonable terms of the cell providers, because, after all, they're not getting a "free" phone any more. So if the companies abuse them, they'll go elsewhere. That's called a competitive market, and it's something we don't really have right now.
I didn't suggest banning the contracts because I'm an idiot and don't realize the consequences. I suggested banning the contracts because I'm smart and can forsee the consequences and those are the consequences I think would be best for our society.
And when they have recouped their investment, how come I'm still locked in until the contract is up? Or do you think all phone values come in nice neat multiples of one or two years of profit margin?
And if I want out, why can't I just pay off the difference between the amount they have recouped and the discount they gave me on the phone? Why do I have to pay an outrageous fee (which is probably more than they paid for the phone in the first place) instead?
It depends on which provider you're using, and which plan. Some providers will not offer service without a contract. Among those that do, I know for a fact that my provider will not offer certain plans without a contract. Now, think about that for a minute: that means that I have to commit to a year of being locked into that provider just so that I can have the privilige of... paying them money every month. And for that commitment, they give me... nothing special. And I paid full price for my own phone!
So, I'm getting fewer minutes for my money than others are, because I don't want any of the crappy phones my provider offers, so I get nothing out of signing a contract.
I intend to write my senators to oppose the bill, on the basis that it gives a stamp of approval to the whole idea of long term cell contracts: even if my cell provider provides perfectly good service, I should be able to drop them any time I feel like it, just like a landline phone. I can cancel a landline phone any time I want to, and the phone company has to cut the bill off based on the number of days of the month I actually had the phone line active. Why should a cellular provider be able to give me any less generous terms?
Many negative factors about the US cell phone system rely on the lengthy contracts or are caused by them: the US gets only the crappy phones the carriers choose to offer and not all the exciting phones sold in europe and japan, because in the US the carriers sell all the phones, because it's the excuse for the lengthy contracts. Indeed, the only really innovative phone to come along in the US is the iPhone, and even that is contractually tied to a single carrier. Also, in the US we have less technological advancement in the network itself because the carriers know you're locked in and can only use the phones they select, so they have less incentive to upgrade because you can't leave them and there's little competition if you could. Further, all the carriers have reputations for poor customer service and network reliability issues in some locations, and frankly they're also all reputed to not care very much, because they know that any customer churn they suffer will be replaced by incoming competitors fleeing the exact same problems from their "competitors".
If we eliminated the lengthy contracts, cell companies would lose their incentive to offer discounts on phones, and would likely choose to start charging full price for phones. This would likely result in a competitive market for equipment arising, resulting in more consumer choice. Further, carriers would then have to directly compete on plan prices and services, resulting in more consumer choice on plans, likely lower prices, and probably also the companies improving their network speed in an effort to actually compete with each other for a change. And of course, they'd have to start giving a damn about dropped calls instead of just blaming the customer, because the customer can actually drop them on the spot and go to someone else until they find someone who can actually give them reliable service.
So, I intend to write to my senators and tell them that if they really want to do any good in the cellular phone market, they should ban all cell phone contracts... or at least, ban all fees for breaking the contract, which would have essentially the same effect.
Thereminists discuss perfect pitch frequently, because a number of noted Thereminists have had it, and it's (falsely) rumored that perfect absolute pitch is required to play the instrument. (Actually, you just need very good relative pitch.)
People who have perfect absolute pitch tend to have always had it: it's a natural talent, or curse as the case may be. They find it painful to listen to tones that are "off key" - indeed, the family of the great Clara Rockmore tells us that she even hated touch tone telephones because the tones were not on-key notes and she didn't want to hear them.
While it is possible to train someone who has a pretty good sense of absolute pitch in the first place to refine it to become extremely good, they'll never reach that level of perfect absolute pitch which some have, in which they can't stand to even hear off key pitches. And someone who has a poor sense of absolute pitch may easily be able to develop their sense of relative pitch, but is unlikely to ever reach the level of being extremely good at it.
Adaptive optics does not require a guide laser. The system often works by identifying an object in the image which is essentially small: a far away star that will register as more or less a point source, for example. It then uses that as its guide, and distorts the mirror to minimize the image of that object: essentially, to focus it. If that object is "focused", then objects near it generally are too.
Using this methodology, a large ground based telescope can easily achieve better imaging than the Hubble, and this has been true for a decade or so. The Hubble is more famous, however, because NASA often uses it to make pretty pictures and puts them out as press releases, while most large ground based telescopes are used to do actual science and the results are a lot of un-photogenic numbers.
It's worse than that. Being a sysadmin is partly a creative task: you have to invent creative solutions to the complex problems and needs users come up with. Measuring sysadmin productivity is a bit like the idea of measuring the value of an artist by the question of how many square inches of painting he produces per hour. It fails to account for the question of whether the painting is Monet's Water Lilies, or just beige.
I've been an IT manager. I recognize in part what drives this sort of nonsense: even if the IT manager knows how stupid this stuff is, they ultimately report to someone higher up who wants a lot of metrics.
You see, IT is a problem-driven field. You don't hear from your users when everything is fine. Nobody calls you to say "Gee, my computer has been working perfectly for months and I just wanted to say thanks." You hear from users when things go wrong, and often they're pissy about it, and blame you for the errors of Microsoft. That may be no big deal to you, but the problem is that a lot of idjit users get it in their head that if they don't get whatever they want in whatever unreasonable timeframe they think is sensible, they should go over your head. Sometimes that means calling the IT director. If the IT director has any sense in their head, they'll tell the users, basically, that no, they can't have a new set of speakers in 5 minutes when we don't have one in stock, and no, fixing their itunes software is just going to have to wait while we do the regular maintenance on the file server to make sure the company stays in business. The users often then complain to upper management that IT is "not doing their job" or "excessively rude" or things like that. These complaints are often fairly outrageous to someone like you who understand reality, but remember that upper management knows little to nothing about computers, and probably can't even comprehend what you do, so unless you can give them a reason to believe you're working hard and solving problems, they start to believe the stupid complaints.
If your IT director is demanding metrics about your work, go look for a new job. If the IT director can't figure out that they have to deal with management demands for metrics and that it's not your problem, they're an idiot and you won't be around long one way or another.
If, on the other hand, you ARE the IT director and you're trying to figure out how to deal with upper management demands for metrics... it ain't easy. Basically, there is no unit of measure for sysadmins. What you need to do is have a really, really good project tracking system. It should track every problem and project your people are working on, and it should track each and every communication you receive from or make to a user and correlate them to projects. Problems should be marked with who reported them, actual severity, importance to organization, and who reported the problem. You need to be able to get reports out of the system to demonstrate things such as what percentage of the time your staff spends doing regular maintenance (this is good, they're doing their jobs), what percentage dealing with ordinary user problems (also good, also their normal job), what percentage dealing with stupid questions from untrained users (shows that upper management hasn't done enough training or has done bad hiring so you can blame them), what percentage dealing with problem users (you know, that guy who calls 5 times a day because he forgot his password... people who should be fired, and you can blame upper management for them too), and what percentage pissing on fires (those problems that won't go away because upper management either won't give you enough staff to actually have time to fix the problem or because they won't throw the money required at the problem, so again, blame them).
I hope you're getting the idea here: you track your staff time very carefully, and then you can use every minute of it to demonstrate either that: 1) you're doing your jobs, or that 2) management is being mean to you and needs t
I would certainly be afraid of false positives: I often plug my personal ipod into my work mac to charge it. (It comes up and asks me if I want to make the ipod work with that computer instead of my home one. I say no. End of problem.) I'm also imagining lots of innocent situations going badly such as, parents buy ipod for college kid, parents plug in ipod to make sure it works, ipod locks itself to parents computer, parents send ipod to their kid, ipod bricks itself.
There are better options. For example, iTunes could prompt the iPod owner to provide a recording of their name and address and phone number, and a password. If the iPod is plugged into somebody else's computer, it could engage a lock mode in which the iPod would constantly play the owner's contact information whenever turned on, and to unlock it would require the owner to input the password. That way the device would not only not work for a thief, but it would also make clear who its owner is.
For that matter, it could play a video of the owner giving their contact information, and scroll the information across the bottom of the screen in text.
I've got... uhm... 19 years working in the industry by now, and I've been both a lead programmer and an IT director, so I say all of this with some assurance:
A degree in IT requires the study of how to use and apply computers. A degree in CS requires the study of how to program computers.
If you get a degree in IT, you'll be able to get jobs in IT. If you get a degree in CS, you'll be able to get jobs in CS or IT. So, that CS degree gives you a lot more job options. Further, a lot of people in IT burn out on it, so if you got a degree in IT, you could end up stuck doing a job you hate, while if you get a degree in CS, you can transition back and forth between IT and programming jobs as you like.
To clarify further, while a programming manager won't hire an IT person as a programmer at any level (they didn't study it, after all, so theyd have to learn years of programming experience on the job), an IT director will generally hire a CS person as an entry level IT person, and then once you have that job experience it's easy to move up the IT ladder as you change jobs. (I went directly from lowly IT grunt in a larger company to IT director in a smaller one.) You really can learn how IT is done on the job, and since there are few barriers to moving up in the field (with so many burnouts there isn't as much experienced competition as you'd expect) it's much better to have that CS degree and then if you want to do IT, work your way up in it.
Point 6 claims that a number of systems "attempted to capitalize on the growing illegal market that Napster fostered", and lists several, including BitTorrent. To my knowledge this is false about BitTorrent; I believe they distributed their software for free and have only attempted to capitalize on their software in lawful ways. Someone might want to contact them about this and ask if they might like to file some kind of statement with courts objecting to this attack on their reputation.
Point 11 claims that determining what "infringing" files are available is as simple as searching a network to see what files are available. However, this is false: if I am offering a file called "madonna_holiday.mp3" that could be Madonna's song, it could be a recording of me commenting on Madonna's song, or it could be an audio ad encouraging listeners to visit a shrine, and there's no way to know without actually copying it to examine its contents... which could constitute copyright infringement on the part of MediaSentry if it is the song and they don't have permission from the copyright holder of the song to make a copy.
Point 12, to clarify, falsely claims that an IP address uniquely identifies an individual computer while in fact it could be merely a sort of proxy address for any number of computers. To use their analogy, it's like the main phone number of a large company: there's only one number, but once you call it, the receptionist could direct your call to any number of internal phone numbers, which you won't necessarily ever know.
To further clarify, Point 12 also falsely claims "The network provider maintains a log of IP address allocations." Many don't. Indeed, if the addresses are being allocated by DHCP, the provider has no particular incentive to maintain this information. If I'm an ISP, corporation, or college, what do I care who was using a particular number 6 weeks ago on thursday at 4:23am?
Point 13 claims "MediaSentry finds individuals using P2P networks to share music files over the Internet." That's not what the earlier points say: the earlier points say that it finds listed files with names that imply that they might contain copyrighted works. It further claims "Just as any other user on the same P2P networks as these individuals would be able to do, MediaSentry is able to detect the infringement of copyrighted works and identify the users' IP addresses because the P2P software being used by those individuals has file-sharing features enabled." I have several issues with that. First, "infringement" constitutes actual copying, doesn't it? So, in order to "detect infringement", you'd have to be able to observe the act of a copy process being performed. If MediaSentry is the one doing the acual copying, then I'd ask a lawyer if that's entrapment. If MediaSentry is not the one doing the actual copying, I'd demand to know what evidence they have to show that an actual copying process occurred, as it would presumably have happened between the theoretically identified party and some third party as yet unnamed, and I doubt most P2P software facilitates third parties to observe transfer interactions between others. In other words, I'm saying that the fact that a file is copyable doesn't mean that it was in fact copied, and if being copied is what actually constitutes violation of the law, the file being copyable then presumably doesn't. A book is copyable, but owning a book doesn't mean I copied it.
Further, the party that MediaSentry claims is offering the files may or may not be aware the files are being shared: it may be that the law might view the infringer as the person who requested and received the file, as it could be claimed that they did the copying, and that the person whose computer was "sharing" files may be no more guilty than someone who left a book laying around and unknowingly permitted someone to photocopy its pages while they weren't in the room.
Point 14 clarifies that MediaSentry does actually download files. It doesn't clarify if they have a lawful right to d
I think they're usually called "Twelve O'Clock Blinkers".
Anyway, there's also the question of how it would differentiate me driving and talking on my cell phone while it's set to speakerphone from me driving while my cell phone sits on the seat next to me and rings but I don't answer it because I know doing so isn't safe, or me driving while my cell phone is in my pocket and just occasionally checking in with the network. Frankly if they do any kind of packet analysis of my signals I would consider that to be a violation of my privacy rights.
Most programmers have difficulty thinking about recursive processes as well, but there are still some who don't and we still have use for them. I should say "us", as I make many other programmers batty by using recursion frequently. Programmers tell me all the time that they find recursion difficult - difficult to write, difficult to trace, difficult to understand, difficult to debug. Conversely, I find it easier - all I have to do is reduce the problem to its simplest form and determine the end case, and a tiny snip of code will do where a huge mess of iterative code would otherwise have been required. So, I don't understand why anyone would want to write iterative code when recursion can solve the problem.
I suspect that parallel programming may be similar - some programmers will "get it", others won't. Those who "get it" will find it fun and easy and be unable to understand why everyone else finds it hard.
Also, most developement tools were created with a single processor system in mind: IDEs for parallel programming are a new-ish concept and there are few. As more are developed we'll learn about how the computer can best help the programmer to create code for a parallel system, and the whole process can become more efficient. Or maybe automated entirely; at least in some cases, if the code can be effectively profiled the computer may be able to determine how to parallelize it and the programmer may not have to worry about it. So, I think it's premature to argue about whether parallel programming is hard or not - it's different, but until we have taken the time to further develop the relevant tools, we won't know if it's really hard or not.
And of course, for a lot of tasks it simply won't *matter* - anything with a live user sitting there, for example, only has to be fast enough that the person perceives it as being instantaneous. Any faster than that is essentially useless. So, for anything that has states requiring user input, there is a "fast enough" beyond which we need not bother optimizing unless we're just trying to speed up the system as a whole, and that sort of optimization is usually done at the compiler level. It is only for software requiring unusually large amounts of computation or for systems which have been abstracted to the point of being massively inefficient beneath the surface that the fastest possible computing speed is really required, and those are the sorts of systems to which specialist programmers could be applied.
Sure it does; if vendor A tells you that the work you need done will cost you a billion dollars and take a year for them to implement, and vendor B does it in front of you in 5 minutes using a product you already bought for $1000, which vendor are you doing to call first next time you need a solution?
We didn't, however, call a dll, we don't use dll's.
So, let me start with my bias: I work for a tiny company that makes a programming language with interpreted environment (we're working on the compiler now) that runs on Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and Solaris, and I think AIX. (Those are the ones we've actually tried it on, it may run on others.) Our language and development environment facilitates rapid development of web applications. (And anything else you like, but web applications is applicable to this discussion.) Using our language you can write fully AJAX enabled applications (which work on IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari, and maybe others) in a Model View Controller pattern without knowing anything about Javascript, with no system dependencies, and in my opinion you can do it much faster with our tools (and be able to run it on all those OS's and browsers) than using traditional languages and APIs (and be able to run it on one OS and/or browser). Once you've written the app, our software will even serve it out (one line of code instantiates and integrates a web server!) so it can be used from various browsers running on various platforms.
Now, knowing as I do that this is all possible - which I'm sure of because I use it every day - it's my opinion that writing software specifically to any API which is tied down to any particular OS or browser is a waste of time. Why spend your time writing software for, say, Linux, knowing that it will just have to be rewritten (or at least altered) to run on Windows and Macos and Solaris etc, when you could write it once in some cross-platform language and be able to run it everywhere and use it everywhere, like Java promised we'd be able to do once upon a time? That promise of cross-platform, cross-browser, write-once run-everywhere computing is not an impossible fantasy, it's something that's here today if you look hard enough, and those of us who develop programming languages and tools for a living should be focusing on it in our work.
So, my point is that "thinking linux first" is indeed a bad thing: if a business person has to decide on what computing platform to use for their software solution and you make them think about linux, they'll just get annoyed because they don't want to have to think about what technology to use and why, they just want to see it happen, and use whatever they're familiar with. They want to think about their business first, and technology as little as they can get away with. The way to get businesses to adopt linux is not to make them think about it, it's to make it so easy they don't have to, and cheap while you're at it. Businesses care about two things, three if they're smart: 1) How to make money 2) How to spend less money 3) How they're going to make even more money in the future
If you can show them that linux will make them money that other OS's can't, they'll go for it. But, there's little that Linux can do that some other OS can't, so that's a poor argument.
You can argue that linux will save money because it's free, and that's good, because businesses like not to spend money, but it's also worrying because businesses like to have someone standing behind the product. Sure, there are companies that provide support and we as geeks all know that, but that's beside the point. Where you can really win is to say that using some particular system will enable the business to be doing the kind of business they want much earlier/faster than other technologies. For example, I watched my boss show a client how they could do something with our programming language in about five lines of code that a competing vendor had told them would take a year and cost over a billion dollars, so our client became *very* interested in using my employer's language a lot more, because it would save them a lot of time and money. So, if you want Linux to get wider acceptance, figure out how using it makes common business tasks go faster and easier than using competing products, and advertise that. So far, as a computing professional my experience with linux is that i
Assuming a 31 day month and assuming she sleeps 8 hours a night, that's an average of one text message every 4.3 minutes all day long, every day. Of course in practice she probably has classes in which her teachers won't allow her to sit there typing away on her cell phone, and has homework (if she actually does it), and needs to put the phone down for a few minutes at meals to use her hands to shovel food into her mouth... so I'd guess that in practice during the time she finds available for texting, the actual rate of message transfer is much higher than once every 4.3 minutes.
Frankly if I had a kid sending text messages that often, I'd send them to a psychologist to try to help them figure out why they have this obsessive compulsive problem that they can't stop using the phone, and to help them get over it. A kid who is texting that frantically all the time has *problems*.
Oh, and I'd tell them they have to pay the bill, even if that means paying me back in installments.
So, I once turned down a good job at a bank because they insisted on doing a credit check on me before I could have the position. As I'd been unemployed a lot and consequently poor, my credit had been screwed up. I told the bank this, and said I didn't want to be subjected to the humiliation of them reading my credit report. They told me that's okay, it's just a formality, but I had to do it. I told them to just assume my credit was as bad as it could be and evaluate me on that basis. They said that no, they had to see the credit report, they claimed they were legally obligated to check the credit of all of their employees, which I didn't believe. I told them that no thanks, I didn't want to work for a company that would subject me to that, and moreover I didn't want to work for a company that would nose around in my private life like that.
It was not a position where I would have, had I been unethical, been able to install back doors, divert funds, etc. I could understand that they wanted to be carefull about their employees. But, when it got to the point of me telling them "just assume the worst about the credit check and move on", and they were both telling me it was just a formality and refusing to move on, I began to feel that the actual *result* of the credit check wasn't as important as knowing that I would submit to it. I found this objectionable because it told me that the credit check wasn't really to protect the bank against unethical employees, it was either there to make the candidate demonstrate that they were willing to jump through the hoop of opening their private life for inspection, or it was there because some idiot applied a blanket policy to the whole company instead of only where it was necessary and if I took a job there I'd be treated like employee unit #4973, not like a person.
Six months passed. I got a job at a consultancy. That bank hired the consultancy. I found myself in their executive offices, advising them (and occasionally writing code for them) on exactly the stuff they'd been trying to hire me to do six months earlier. Only this time they were paying my firm $300 an hour for my time, and I didn't have to submit to a credit check.
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I rather doubt that the contract explicitly authorizes them to enforce the contract by the means of forging communications from you or to you. If they really feel it's a violation of contract, they can cut off your connection to their network, but I really doubt it's legal for them to use forgery as a method of enforcement.
The problem is that you're going to start seeing shortages of professionals in certain fields in the US. When there's a shortage of good programmers we programmers think that's a great idea because it means our salary goes up, but when there's a severe shortage of pharmacists or obstetricians, that's more of a problem.
I worked for a small medical university a few years ago, and it also had a very high percentage of foreign students. Why? The answer is simple: they could afford it. With tuition over $45,000 a year, few Americans can just cough up that kind of cash. On the other hand, there's a whole world out there to search for people who want to go to medical school and can afford it and qualify to get in.
If the US wants to continue to have high numbers of qualified professionals available to fill societal needs, we're going to have to start doing something about cost of education.
I did some fairly extensive work with google maps, and I can say that their API is very well documented.
Personally, I wrote a local API for it in the language I'm working in, Water, and let Water deal with all the Google stuff for me. By mixing Water's AJAX features with Google's map API, I was able to create a fully AJAX enabled map API which notifies the server about every user action on the map, including clicking, dragging, etc, and deals with user initiated actions in an object oriented manner (for example, if a user clicks on a pin point on the map in the browser, it fires an event in the corresponding place object in the server). I also created an interface to KML, the language which was used by Google Earth and which is sometimes used by google maps now. KML is also well documented. I linked that into our place objects as well, so you can easily get a google map or some kml for any place object. KML is also useful because some other commercial mapping products are now starting to use KML as well.
I certainly wouldn't have been able to do all this without excellent documentation and a rich API from Google. Thanks to them providing both, the implementation went quickly and easily, and now Water has a fabulous map API thanks to Google making it all easy. And yes, I do have a clue what some of the alternatives are: prior to doing the implementation with Google Maps, I did another implementation using government services. (Actually, both are just subclasses of our abstract cartographer class, so it's a very direct comparison.) Google offered a much richer and easier API.
I did look at some other online mapping services, and if they offered an API, I found them to be more limited.
I can't comment on the Microsoft API or documentation, I haven't tried them.
I am a man. I've worked in a variety of companies from Fortune 100 companies to tiny 6 person startups over the years. In these various positions I've worked with quite a few women, sometimes as my peers, sometimes as my direct reports, sometimes as my manager. I've hired both men and women, and been happy with the performance of everyone I hired.
The only aspect of working with women that has bothered me is that most of these women have simply assumed that any disagreement I had with them or problem in our working relationship resulted from sexism. Some complained to me about it. Others complained to my employer and tried to get me fired without bothering to speak with me first.
The reality is, I treat women on the job the same way as I treat men on the job: I try to be friendly and professional, I point out mistakes when I see them, I get grouchy sometimes when I didn't get enough sleep, I complain when I think I've been mistreated, I apologize when I realize I should, and whenever possible I try to help everyone around me do their best, excel at their work, and if possible get promoted. But when I'm having a hard time with a guy, either he puts up with it or he complains to me about it... when I'm having a hard time with a woman, she usually either tells me I'm sexist or tells my boss I'm sexist.
It really offends me. All my life I've been surrounded by strong women who were great role models. In college, most of my computer science professors were women, as was the dean of computer science, so women taught me my job. Several of the most disciplined, constructive, and effective managers I've worked for have been women. I'd have to be an idiot not to recognize that women are just as capable of being effective and creative in the computing fields as any men are. And yet, if I have any difficulty getting along with any woman on the job, she immediately denounces me as that sexist idiot.
Fortunately, in the cases where someone complained to my employer, none of them took it seriously... although in one case it did go so far as my having to offer to produce a list of women who have managed me and/or worked for me who would be willing to vouch for my non-sexism.
After decades of this kind of treatment, I try very hard to continue to treat women at work the same as men at work, but I have to admit I have become wary of the false accusations, and I resent having to have that wariness.
And he would have finished it, if each of his books wasn't 150 pages or so of plot and 450 pages or so of whining about how come she has prettier embroidery on her dress than I have on mine and I'm jealous that she has better furiniture than I do and unending angst over whether or not I should use my powers and whine whine whine complain complain moan whine whine. If all his characters weren't such whiny bastards, the series could have been done several books ago.
I agree - and I'd say that what they call a "software engineer" is what most people I've known in the industry call a "senior programmer".
I disagree about government being an avenue to that senior progammer / software engineer job though: industry doesn't like to hire people who don't have industry-specific experience. THEIR industry. If you've done computing in the telecommunications industry all your career and apply for a computing job in the travel industry, they'll give you a hard time about it (or just ignore you) even if you'd actually be doing exactly the same work. Employers just have a hard time realizing that some skills are general purpose.
Most employers also don't really want senior programmers / software engineers, even when they need one. They just don't want to pay for someone senior enough to do that sort of work. Take my word for this: I *am* that sort of software engineer who can do all the requirements gathering and software architecture etc, and my employers have universally strongly praised my skills in those areas, but they have also repeatedly gotten rid of me in favor of someone cheaper. I had one incident where I got my annual review on a friday afternoon in which they told me they were so thrilled with my work that they couldn't possibly be happier and please just keep up the fantastic work, and then at 9am monday morning the HR person was waiting to terminate my employment because they'd decided to go with outsourcing my work because they thought it would be cheaper. (It wasn't, but they did it anyway.) In several cases, as I was being terminated I asked them if they realized that their new plans would result in them getting inferior workmanship and probably slower too, and they told me fairly bluntly that yes, that's fine with them as long as it's cheaper than my salary.
My prediction of what's going to happen to the job market for programmers and senior programmers (or software engineers or whatever you want to call us) is that demand is going to slowly drop, and that it's generally a bad idea to get into this field right now because if you're one of the new guys in programming you're going to be at a significant disadvantage in competing for the smaller number of jobs available, and there's a strong chance that you won't be one of the survivors: you'll end up dropping out of the computing/programming field to do something else for a living, and you may suffer for not having an education in that other field, or worse, you might have to work in IT (aka IS aka MIS), which is presently rated the most hated job in America, largely due to the crappy treatment IT people get from employers. Anyway, this dearth of programming jobs will lead to a dearth of programming students. Then, the old age effect will kick in, as senior people start retiring or moving into management, and it will create a strange sort of vacuum in the field: there won't be many jobs, but there won't be many competent people to fill them either. My guess is that in the long run the situation will stabilize with fewer programming jobs than we've had in the past, but that the qualified people who are able to do them will earn better.
If people are really concerned that he's dead, figure out what town he lives in, call up his local police, tell them the story, and explain that you'd like them to do a "health and welfare check". They'll find him and see if he's alive and/or needs medical attention, or if he's dead. They might even tell you the result.
And then there's clients. A lot of web programming gets done either by a consultancy or at least by a programmer who works for someone who isn't a programmer. When you have non-technical people involved too deeply in the process, dumb things happen.
The article talks about things like how easy the URLs are... I had a client for which my then boss made the mistake of bringing up this topic with them, and they freaked out and spent a week coming up with a new naming scheme that was insanely complex (but they thought it was easy) and made for filenames so long that the version control system couldn't handle them. Then they got really angry with us because we brought the subject up and then "refused" to do what they wanted us to. In many situations such as this, I believe it's in the best interest of all involved for the developer to make a decision about how best to serve the site's audience and go with it, because sometimes gathering the requirements just opens up a huge can of worms unnecessarily.
The article also talks about developers anal-retentively making page layouts that control everything down to the individual pixel level of precision, and then if the slightest thing changes on the page (such as the logo) the page layout has to be substantially reworked to accommodate it. This is not abnormal. Indeed, every Fortune 500 company whose web site I worked on insisted on this level of precision, understood the consequences, and was prepared to pay for the time it would take to do the work that way. I worked out reliable methods to quickly and easily lay out a page with absolute precision, with certain reasonable constraints. Any developer working in that sort of environment does the same.
The article complains about building a site to support a specific browser. While I certainly will be among the first to chew out a programmer who builds a site to only work in one browser to the exclusion of others, I believe that it's normal and good to build it to work in a specific *set* of browsers. It's all well and good to say how standards are important and we should all write standards complaint code, except for the minor detail that none of the actual browsers are truly standards complaint as implemented. Oh sure, some are much better than others, but none are really perfect, so if you want to ensure that your site (or application) is going to actually work, the only way to do so is to code it in a way that copes with the known quirks of the various browsers.
Refactoring is a great thing to do when you need to do it. However, I try to design my software for scalability up front when possible so that I don't have to do a lot of refactoring down the road.
I don't know more polite way to put this, so I'm going to have to say it bluntly: Are you stupid or something?
When a customer gets a phone for $0 with a 3 year contract, they're paying for that phone, in full: it raises the cost of the service. The cell companies are not financially incompetent. If they "give" you a phone, they're going to make sure their rate plan is correspondingly higher to ensure that they recoup that cost. And further, once they have recouped that cost, they're not going to lower the price of your plan - why should they? You're locked into a contract, after all. So you're going to keep paying for that phone, and paying for it, and paying for it, forever, until you replace it or drop the service.
If consumers didn't get phones "free" from their provider, you're right, they'd have to pay for it. And you know what? Hardly anyone justifies a $400 phone purchase. That phone the cell company is "giving" you ISN'T A $400 PHONE. I have a $400 phone. Let me tell you, a $400 phone is a pretty high end phone. It's way nicer than any of the crappy phones my cell provider offers for "free", or even any of the phones they charge for in addition to locking you into a contract. Consumers will still be able to buy a cheap phone if they want to: they're just going to have to wise up and actually save up the money to buy what they want instead of expecting it to fall from the sky as a gift.
And if consumers have to pay for their own phones, they're no longer going to be willing to accept some of the high prices and unreasonable terms of the cell providers, because, after all, they're not getting a "free" phone any more. So if the companies abuse them, they'll go elsewhere. That's called a competitive market, and it's something we don't really have right now.
I didn't suggest banning the contracts because I'm an idiot and don't realize the consequences. I suggested banning the contracts because I'm smart and can forsee the consequences and those are the consequences I think would be best for our society.
And when they have recouped their investment, how come I'm still locked in until the contract is up? Or do you think all phone values come in nice neat multiples of one or two years of profit margin?
And if I want out, why can't I just pay off the difference between the amount they have recouped and the discount they gave me on the phone? Why do I have to pay an outrageous fee (which is probably more than they paid for the phone in the first place) instead?
It depends on which provider you're using, and which plan. Some providers will not offer service without a contract. Among those that do, I know for a fact that my provider will not offer certain plans without a contract. Now, think about that for a minute: that means that I have to commit to a year of being locked into that provider just so that I can have the privilige of... paying them money every month. And for that commitment, they give me... nothing special. And I paid full price for my own phone!
So, I'm getting fewer minutes for my money than others are, because I don't want any of the crappy phones my provider offers, so I get nothing out of signing a contract.
SAFEWORD!
I intend to write my senators to oppose the bill, on the basis that it gives a stamp of approval to the whole idea of long term cell contracts: even if my cell provider provides perfectly good service, I should be able to drop them any time I feel like it, just like a landline phone. I can cancel a landline phone any time I want to, and the phone company has to cut the bill off based on the number of days of the month I actually had the phone line active. Why should a cellular provider be able to give me any less generous terms?
Many negative factors about the US cell phone system rely on the lengthy contracts or are caused by them: the US gets only the crappy phones the carriers choose to offer and not all the exciting phones sold in europe and japan, because in the US the carriers sell all the phones, because it's the excuse for the lengthy contracts. Indeed, the only really innovative phone to come along in the US is the iPhone, and even that is contractually tied to a single carrier. Also, in the US we have less technological advancement in the network itself because the carriers know you're locked in and can only use the phones they select, so they have less incentive to upgrade because you can't leave them and there's little competition if you could. Further, all the carriers have reputations for poor customer service and network reliability issues in some locations, and frankly they're also all reputed to not care very much, because they know that any customer churn they suffer will be replaced by incoming competitors fleeing the exact same problems from their "competitors".
If we eliminated the lengthy contracts, cell companies would lose their incentive to offer discounts on phones, and would likely choose to start charging full price for phones. This would likely result in a competitive market for equipment arising, resulting in more consumer choice. Further, carriers would then have to directly compete on plan prices and services, resulting in more consumer choice on plans, likely lower prices, and probably also the companies improving their network speed in an effort to actually compete with each other for a change. And of course, they'd have to start giving a damn about dropped calls instead of just blaming the customer, because the customer can actually drop them on the spot and go to someone else until they find someone who can actually give them reliable service.
So, I intend to write to my senators and tell them that if they really want to do any good in the cellular phone market, they should ban all cell phone contracts... or at least, ban all fees for breaking the contract, which would have essentially the same effect.
Thereminists discuss perfect pitch frequently, because a number of noted Thereminists have had it, and it's (falsely) rumored that perfect absolute pitch is required to play the instrument. (Actually, you just need very good relative pitch.)
People who have perfect absolute pitch tend to have always had it: it's a natural talent, or curse as the case may be. They find it painful to listen to tones that are "off key" - indeed, the family of the great Clara Rockmore tells us that she even hated touch tone telephones because the tones were not on-key notes and she didn't want to hear them.
While it is possible to train someone who has a pretty good sense of absolute pitch in the first place to refine it to become extremely good, they'll never reach that level of perfect absolute pitch which some have, in which they can't stand to even hear off key pitches. And someone who has a poor sense of absolute pitch may easily be able to develop their sense of relative pitch, but is unlikely to ever reach the level of being extremely good at it.
Adaptive optics does not require a guide laser. The system often works by identifying an object in the image which is essentially small: a far away star that will register as more or less a point source, for example. It then uses that as its guide, and distorts the mirror to minimize the image of that object: essentially, to focus it. If that object is "focused", then objects near it generally are too.
Using this methodology, a large ground based telescope can easily achieve better imaging than the Hubble, and this has been true for a decade or so. The Hubble is more famous, however, because NASA often uses it to make pretty pictures and puts them out as press releases, while most large ground based telescopes are used to do actual science and the results are a lot of un-photogenic numbers.
It's worse than that. Being a sysadmin is partly a creative task: you have to invent creative solutions to the complex problems and needs users come up with. Measuring sysadmin productivity is a bit like the idea of measuring the value of an artist by the question of how many square inches of painting he produces per hour. It fails to account for the question of whether the painting is Monet's Water Lilies, or just beige.
I've been an IT manager. I recognize in part what drives this sort of nonsense: even if the IT manager knows how stupid this stuff is, they ultimately report to someone higher up who wants a lot of metrics.
You see, IT is a problem-driven field. You don't hear from your users when everything is fine. Nobody calls you to say "Gee, my computer has been working perfectly for months and I just wanted to say thanks." You hear from users when things go wrong, and often they're pissy about it, and blame you for the errors of Microsoft. That may be no big deal to you, but the problem is that a lot of idjit users get it in their head that if they don't get whatever they want in whatever unreasonable timeframe they think is sensible, they should go over your head. Sometimes that means calling the IT director. If the IT director has any sense in their head, they'll tell the users, basically, that no, they can't have a new set of speakers in 5 minutes when we don't have one in stock, and no, fixing their itunes software is just going to have to wait while we do the regular maintenance on the file server to make sure the company stays in business. The users often then complain to upper management that IT is "not doing their job" or "excessively rude" or things like that. These complaints are often fairly outrageous to someone like you who understand reality, but remember that upper management knows little to nothing about computers, and probably can't even comprehend what you do, so unless you can give them a reason to believe you're working hard and solving problems, they start to believe the stupid complaints.
If your IT director is demanding metrics about your work, go look for a new job. If the IT director can't figure out that they have to deal with management demands for metrics and that it's not your problem, they're an idiot and you won't be around long one way or another.
If, on the other hand, you ARE the IT director and you're trying to figure out how to deal with upper management demands for metrics... it ain't easy. Basically, there is no unit of measure for sysadmins. What you need to do is have a really, really good project tracking system. It should track every problem and project your people are working on, and it should track each and every communication you receive from or make to a user and correlate them to projects. Problems should be marked with who reported them, actual severity, importance to organization, and who reported the problem. You need to be able to get reports out of the system to demonstrate things such as what percentage of the time your staff spends doing regular maintenance (this is good, they're doing their jobs), what percentage dealing with ordinary user problems (also good, also their normal job), what percentage dealing with stupid questions from untrained users (shows that upper management hasn't done enough training or has done bad hiring so you can blame them), what percentage dealing with problem users (you know, that guy who calls 5 times a day because he forgot his password... people who should be fired, and you can blame upper management for them too), and what percentage pissing on fires (those problems that won't go away because upper management either won't give you enough staff to actually have time to fix the problem or because they won't throw the money required at the problem, so again, blame them).
I hope you're getting the idea here: you track your staff time very carefully, and then you can use every minute of it to demonstrate either that: 1) you're doing your jobs, or that 2) management is being mean to you and needs t
I would certainly be afraid of false positives: I often plug my personal ipod into my work mac to charge it. (It comes up and asks me if I want to make the ipod work with that computer instead of my home one. I say no. End of problem.) I'm also imagining lots of innocent situations going badly such as, parents buy ipod for college kid, parents plug in ipod to make sure it works, ipod locks itself to parents computer, parents send ipod to their kid, ipod bricks itself.
There are better options. For example, iTunes could prompt the iPod owner to provide a recording of their name and address and phone number, and a password. If the iPod is plugged into somebody else's computer, it could engage a lock mode in which the iPod would constantly play the owner's contact information whenever turned on, and to unlock it would require the owner to input the password. That way the device would not only not work for a thief, but it would also make clear who its owner is.
For that matter, it could play a video of the owner giving their contact information, and scroll the information across the bottom of the screen in text.
I've got... uhm... 19 years working in the industry by now, and I've been both a lead programmer and an IT director, so I say all of this with some assurance:
A degree in IT requires the study of how to use and apply computers. A degree in CS requires the study of how to program computers.
If you get a degree in IT, you'll be able to get jobs in IT. If you get a degree in CS, you'll be able to get jobs in CS or IT. So, that CS degree gives you a lot more job options. Further, a lot of people in IT burn out on it, so if you got a degree in IT, you could end up stuck doing a job you hate, while if you get a degree in CS, you can transition back and forth between IT and programming jobs as you like.
To clarify further, while a programming manager won't hire an IT person as a programmer at any level (they didn't study it, after all, so theyd have to learn years of programming experience on the job), an IT director will generally hire a CS person as an entry level IT person, and then once you have that job experience it's easy to move up the IT ladder as you change jobs. (I went directly from lowly IT grunt in a larger company to IT director in a smaller one.) You really can learn how IT is done on the job, and since there are few barriers to moving up in the field (with so many burnouts there isn't as much experienced competition as you'd expect) it's much better to have that CS degree and then if you want to do IT, work your way up in it.
Point 6 claims that a number of systems "attempted to capitalize on the growing illegal market that Napster fostered", and lists several, including BitTorrent. To my knowledge this is false about BitTorrent; I believe they distributed their software for free and have only attempted to capitalize on their software in lawful ways. Someone might want to contact them about this and ask if they might like to file some kind of statement with courts objecting to this attack on their reputation.
Point 11 claims that determining what "infringing" files are available is as simple as searching a network to see what files are available. However, this is false: if I am offering a file called "madonna_holiday.mp3" that could be Madonna's song, it could be a recording of me commenting on Madonna's song, or it could be an audio ad encouraging listeners to visit a shrine, and there's no way to know without actually copying it to examine its contents... which could constitute copyright infringement on the part of MediaSentry if it is the song and they don't have permission from the copyright holder of the song to make a copy.
Point 12, to clarify, falsely claims that an IP address uniquely identifies an individual computer while in fact it could be merely a sort of proxy address for any number of computers. To use their analogy, it's like the main phone number of a large company: there's only one number, but once you call it, the receptionist could direct your call to any number of internal phone numbers, which you won't necessarily ever know.
To further clarify, Point 12 also falsely claims "The network provider maintains a log of IP address allocations." Many don't. Indeed, if the addresses are being allocated by DHCP, the provider has no particular incentive to maintain this information. If I'm an ISP, corporation, or college, what do I care who was using a particular number 6 weeks ago on thursday at 4:23am?
Point 13 claims "MediaSentry finds individuals using P2P networks to share music files over the Internet." That's not what the earlier points say: the earlier points say that it finds listed files with names that imply that they might contain copyrighted works. It further claims "Just as any other user on the same P2P networks as these individuals would be able to do, MediaSentry is able to detect the infringement of copyrighted works and identify the users' IP addresses because the P2P software being used by those individuals has file-sharing features enabled." I have several issues with that. First, "infringement" constitutes actual copying, doesn't it? So, in order to "detect infringement", you'd have to be able to observe the act of a copy process being performed. If MediaSentry is the one doing the acual copying, then I'd ask a lawyer if that's entrapment. If MediaSentry is not the one doing the actual copying, I'd demand to know what evidence they have to show that an actual copying process occurred, as it would presumably have happened between the theoretically identified party and some third party as yet unnamed, and I doubt most P2P software facilitates third parties to observe transfer interactions between others. In other words, I'm saying that the fact that a file is copyable doesn't mean that it was in fact copied, and if being copied is what actually constitutes violation of the law, the file being copyable then presumably doesn't. A book is copyable, but owning a book doesn't mean I copied it.
Further, the party that MediaSentry claims is offering the files may or may not be aware the files are being shared: it may be that the law might view the infringer as the person who requested and received the file, as it could be claimed that they did the copying, and that the person whose computer was "sharing" files may be no more guilty than someone who left a book laying around and unknowingly permitted someone to photocopy its pages while they weren't in the room.
Point 14 clarifies that MediaSentry does actually download files. It doesn't clarify if they have a lawful right to d
I think they're usually called "Twelve O'Clock Blinkers".
Anyway, there's also the question of how it would differentiate me driving and talking on my cell phone while it's set to speakerphone from me driving while my cell phone sits on the seat next to me and rings but I don't answer it because I know doing so isn't safe, or me driving while my cell phone is in my pocket and just occasionally checking in with the network. Frankly if they do any kind of packet analysis of my signals I would consider that to be a violation of my privacy rights.
Most programmers have difficulty thinking about recursive processes as well, but there are still some who don't and we still have use for them. I should say "us", as I make many other programmers batty by using recursion frequently. Programmers tell me all the time that they find recursion difficult - difficult to write, difficult to trace, difficult to understand, difficult to debug. Conversely, I find it easier - all I have to do is reduce the problem to its simplest form and determine the end case, and a tiny snip of code will do where a huge mess of iterative code would otherwise have been required. So, I don't understand why anyone would want to write iterative code when recursion can solve the problem.
I suspect that parallel programming may be similar - some programmers will "get it", others won't. Those who "get it" will find it fun and easy and be unable to understand why everyone else finds it hard.
Also, most developement tools were created with a single processor system in mind: IDEs for parallel programming are a new-ish concept and there are few. As more are developed we'll learn about how the computer can best help the programmer to create code for a parallel system, and the whole process can become more efficient. Or maybe automated entirely; at least in some cases, if the code can be effectively profiled the computer may be able to determine how to parallelize it and the programmer may not have to worry about it. So, I think it's premature to argue about whether parallel programming is hard or not - it's different, but until we have taken the time to further develop the relevant tools, we won't know if it's really hard or not.
And of course, for a lot of tasks it simply won't *matter* - anything with a live user sitting there, for example, only has to be fast enough that the person perceives it as being instantaneous. Any faster than that is essentially useless. So, for anything that has states requiring user input, there is a "fast enough" beyond which we need not bother optimizing unless we're just trying to speed up the system as a whole, and that sort of optimization is usually done at the compiler level. It is only for software requiring unusually large amounts of computation or for systems which have been abstracted to the point of being massively inefficient beneath the surface that the fastest possible computing speed is really required, and those are the sorts of systems to which specialist programmers could be applied.
Sure it does; if vendor A tells you that the work you need done will cost you a billion dollars and take a year for them to implement, and vendor B does it in front of you in 5 minutes using a product you already bought for $1000, which vendor are you doing to call first next time you need a solution?
We didn't, however, call a dll, we don't use dll's.
So, let me start with my bias: I work for a tiny company that makes a programming language with interpreted environment (we're working on the compiler now) that runs on Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and Solaris, and I think AIX. (Those are the ones we've actually tried it on, it may run on others.) Our language and development environment facilitates rapid development of web applications. (And anything else you like, but web applications is applicable to this discussion.) Using our language you can write fully AJAX enabled applications (which work on IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari, and maybe others) in a Model View Controller pattern without knowing anything about Javascript, with no system dependencies, and in my opinion you can do it much faster with our tools (and be able to run it on all those OS's and browsers) than using traditional languages and APIs (and be able to run it on one OS and/or browser). Once you've written the app, our software will even serve it out (one line of code instantiates and integrates a web server!) so it can be used from various browsers running on various platforms.
Now, knowing as I do that this is all possible - which I'm sure of because I use it every day - it's my opinion that writing software specifically to any API which is tied down to any particular OS or browser is a waste of time. Why spend your time writing software for, say, Linux, knowing that it will just have to be rewritten (or at least altered) to run on Windows and Macos and Solaris etc, when you could write it once in some cross-platform language and be able to run it everywhere and use it everywhere, like Java promised we'd be able to do once upon a time? That promise of cross-platform, cross-browser, write-once run-everywhere computing is not an impossible fantasy, it's something that's here today if you look hard enough, and those of us who develop programming languages and tools for a living should be focusing on it in our work.
So, my point is that "thinking linux first" is indeed a bad thing: if a business person has to decide on what computing platform to use for their software solution and you make them think about linux, they'll just get annoyed because they don't want to have to think about what technology to use and why, they just want to see it happen, and use whatever they're familiar with. They want to think about their business first, and technology as little as they can get away with. The way to get businesses to adopt linux is not to make them think about it, it's to make it so easy they don't have to, and cheap while you're at it. Businesses care about two things, three if they're smart:
1) How to make money
2) How to spend less money
3) How they're going to make even more money in the future
If you can show them that linux will make them money that other OS's can't, they'll go for it. But, there's little that Linux can do that some other OS can't, so that's a poor argument.
You can argue that linux will save money because it's free, and that's good, because businesses like not to spend money, but it's also worrying because businesses like to have someone standing behind the product. Sure, there are companies that provide support and we as geeks all know that, but that's beside the point. Where you can really win is to say that using some particular system will enable the business to be doing the kind of business they want much earlier/faster than other technologies. For example, I watched my boss show a client how they could do something with our programming language in about five lines of code that a competing vendor had told them would take a year and cost over a billion dollars, so our client became *very* interested in using my employer's language a lot more, because it would save them a lot of time and money. So, if you want Linux to get wider acceptance, figure out how using it makes common business tasks go faster and easier than using competing products, and advertise that. So far, as a computing professional my experience with linux is that i
Assuming a 31 day month and assuming she sleeps 8 hours a night, that's an average of one text message every 4.3 minutes all day long, every day. Of course in practice she probably has classes in which her teachers won't allow her to sit there typing away on her cell phone, and has homework (if she actually does it), and needs to put the phone down for a few minutes at meals to use her hands to shovel food into her mouth... so I'd guess that in practice during the time she finds available for texting, the actual rate of message transfer is much higher than once every 4.3 minutes.
Frankly if I had a kid sending text messages that often, I'd send them to a psychologist to try to help them figure out why they have this obsessive compulsive problem that they can't stop using the phone, and to help them get over it. A kid who is texting that frantically all the time has *problems*.
Oh, and I'd tell them they have to pay the bill, even if that means paying me back in installments.
So, I once turned down a good job at a bank because they insisted on doing a credit check on me before I could have the position. As I'd been unemployed a lot and consequently poor, my credit had been screwed up. I told the bank this, and said I didn't want to be subjected to the humiliation of them reading my credit report. They told me that's okay, it's just a formality, but I had to do it. I told them to just assume my credit was as bad as it could be and evaluate me on that basis. They said that no, they had to see the credit report, they claimed they were legally obligated to check the credit of all of their employees, which I didn't believe. I told them that no thanks, I didn't want to work for a company that would subject me to that, and moreover I didn't want to work for a company that would nose around in my private life like that.
It was not a position where I would have, had I been unethical, been able to install back doors, divert funds, etc. I could understand that they wanted to be carefull about their employees. But, when it got to the point of me telling them "just assume the worst about the credit check and move on", and they were both telling me it was just a formality and refusing to move on, I began to feel that the actual *result* of the credit check wasn't as important as knowing that I would submit to it. I found this objectionable because it told me that the credit check wasn't really to protect the bank against unethical employees, it was either there to make the candidate demonstrate that they were willing to jump through the hoop of opening their private life for inspection, or it was there because some idiot applied a blanket policy to the whole company instead of only where it was necessary and if I took a job there I'd be treated like employee unit #4973, not like a person.
Six months passed. I got a job at a consultancy. That bank hired the consultancy. I found myself in their executive offices, advising them (and occasionally writing code for them) on exactly the stuff they'd been trying to hire me to do six months earlier. Only this time they were paying my firm $300 an hour for my time, and I didn't have to submit to a credit check.