It sounds like you just want to chase high-paying jobs. That's fine, but I'd suggest that it's pointless to guess where the best opportunities will be years or decades from now.
Figure out what you want to do, and then figure out how to make money at it. Don't worry about whether your starting salary will be $40,000 or $50,000 (or $25,000); focus on choosing a career path that will keep you happy.
CNN had a story this morning showing a set of voting machines with color LCD touch screens. The voter inserts a card into the machine, and then the machine guides the user through the voting process, allowing the user to touch onscreen buttons to vote.
The anchor asked the correspondent how a write-in vote is handled, and the correspondent didn't know.
Sorry, I don't remember where these machines were.
I'm not sure that colleges are turning out "coders". Most computer-related degrees are either computer science or computer/electrical engineering. The difference between the two is like the difference between mathematics and traditional engineering. Engineers need a background in math, and mathematicians can find novel solutions to engineering problems, but an engineer is not a mathematician and vice versa.
Neither discipline is intended to turn out "coders", which I assume means "people who can write programs to solve problems". The purpose of college/university is higher education, not job training. If you just need "coders", hire a few bright high school kids and give them copies of "Learn Visual Basic In Two Days" or whatever.
I back up a lot of my stuff to www.xdrive.com and www.driveway.com.
You also get lots of free storage space by creating free web pages at www.tripod.com, www.geocities.com, etc.
Of course, the downside to this is that you can only access stuff when your Internet connection is up. But the fact that I can access this stuff from practically anywhere is a big plus, even if my computer blows up, my house burns down, or whatever.
I'd suggest using PGP or GnuPG to encrypt any sensitive data you upload to sites such as these. Trust no one.
Not true. When you compile a CORBA application, the resulting object modules will only be linkable with a single ORB's libraries. BOA, POA, and CORBAservices don't help with this.
BTW, what's faster than vtables?
-- Kris
I think it is a very clear, noble and realistic point of view. Sony has manufactured a playstation. Why would they force you to sign an NDA to develop for it? Why shouldn't they make the consessions, open up their API and allow people to develop freely for their closed platform.
Sony doesn't make much money from the Playstation hardware; I've heard that they actually lose money on the console sales. The revenues come from game licensing. NDAs and other restrictive measures are necessary for that business model.
(Before someone flames me: I'd like an open gaming platform--I'm just pointing out Sony's strategy and explaining why they wouldn't want people to "develop freely for their closed platform".)
COM can be used for scripting languages and cross-language development because it is a binary standard. COM components can be loaded into a process and used by clients within a process, because Microsoft has defined what the low-level bindings are.
CORBA, on the other hand, strives to be independent of languages, operating systems, and other platform-specific issues. So the OMG has stayed away from low-level binary bindings.
There are good reasons for CORBA's focus on platform independence, but the downside is that there is no standard way to load components from a shared library and access them. Some ORB products do provide this capability, but they are not interoperable. (For example, if you build a DLL that uses MICO, you probably can't use it from an application written that uses Orbit, omniORB or TAO.)
Check out the comp.object.corba newsgroup archives for more information about this. This subject comes up a lot--someone asks "Why can't CORBA do what COM does", and someone replies "COM sucks. Microsoft sucks. Why on earth would you want to do what they do?"
I'll be thrilled if Handspring comes out with a serial cable. The only cable they sell is for USB, and I don't like carrying that serial cradle around with my laptop.
I'd find this much more useful than a tiny color screen.
I actually did use my old Macintosh SE as a doorstop for a while. But I don't think anyone got the joke.
Re:PGPing your email?
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GPG vs. PGP?
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A PGP/GPG "signature" is not necessarily legally binding in any way. It simply proves that the message was generated by you, and not forged or modified by someone else.
Right now, most people do not use signatures, and so anyone who does is considered to be "weird" and is therefore under suspicion. If everyone used signed messages all the time, then it would not be suspicious behavior. It's a little like using envelopes for mail instead of using postcards. People who use envelopes aren't necessarily trying to hide something, and since everyone uses them, no one notices.
If you really studied "Mr. Stallman's open source philosophy", you'd find that he is in fact opposed to the new "open source" movement, and that freedom is his goal.
You are absolutely right to see that RMS considers the license to be of paramount importance. He has said that he would rather use bad free software than good non-free software.
It's certainly true that other community leaders like Eric S. Raymond and Linus Torvalds have a more corporate-friendly attitude, and different philosophies. But I don't see how you can say that RMS's argument is "flawed". He just has goals that differ from those of you and your clients.
The idea is not that you're forced to continue sales--you must continue sales to retain copyright protection. That doesn't seem completely unreasonable. It probably make sense to have some sort of time limit (e.g., if you discontinue sales for ten years, then copyright goes away).
And it's not completely without precedent. Companies that stop using trademarks can lose the exclusive rights to them.
And large companies might actually support this idea. The big megamedia giants like Disney are always selling things, so they can keep their copyrights forever. But they can start pillaging the works of less-successful authors and companies that have gone out of business.
Yeah, can some Amiga fan out there explain why there is such loyalty to the Amiga name? The original Amiga hardware was really cool. But the company currently called "Amiga" is no longer producing anything like it, or descended from it. And it is an entirely different set of people running and working at the company.
This is really not meant to be a troll. I actually want to know if I am missing something here.
Yes, the "mental poker" protocol is cool. But you gave no indication of how this same idea would be beneficial to ensuring the fairness of a FPS (or go or chess or the other games you mentioned). The poker protocol provides a way for two people who don't trust one another to "randomly" draw cards and ensure that no one cheats. How would this apply to ensuring that no one can see through walls or use aimbots in Quake?
My point is that design of secure protocols is hard work. Too many people just say "Well, we can encrypt such-and-such: that makes it secure." It's not that easy. Reading through Schneier's and other authors' books presents lots of interesting protocols. But note how many of those protocols were initially thought to be secure, and were later found to have holes.
It's true that Mac hardware is pretty cool, and that people who know the Mac inside and out can do some pretty cool things with it.
But I think the reason that open-source never took off on the Mac is that it didn't have a "real operating system". No preemptive multitasking, no protected memory, no IPC, no way to do quick-and-dirty command line programs. In short, not like UNIX.
I'm not criticizing the Mac, but most of the really cool open-source projects over the past 10-20 years have been UNIX-based, and the Mac just didn't attract any of the people who were working on them, because it didn't support their style of programming and didn't seem like a worthwhile platform. Let's face it--it's easier to port UNIX-style apps to MS-DOS than it is to port them to the Mac.
After playing around with the Fitaly on my Handspring Visor, I can believe that it's better than the QWERTY keyboard layout for pen tapping.
But it still pales in comparison to Graffiti input. The main problem with keyboard tapping is that you have to look at the keyboard while doing it. With Graffiti, your eyes are free. (Like touch-typing.)
For those who have trouble getting Grafitti to recognize their handwriting, I'd recommend TealScript.
It's rather unfortunate that unlike moderation itself, Meta-moderation does not seem to have any checks and balances to prevent abuses. Hopefully someone will reform it.
To most users, the GUI is the operating system. It is the thing that makes their computer work.
Kernels, file systems, network stacks, etc. are just things that geeks want to argue about.
I wouldn't consider this to be "confusion". Something that Mac people got right is a focus on user perceptions rather than upon implementation details.
In 1980, I was using my Atari 800 to access data over PSTN (CompuServe and BBSes). I don't think this idea was very original.
Could someone point out exactly what part of the patent describes "hyperlinks"? It talks a lot about using keys, but the patent really seems to describe those VideoText systems that failed so miserably in the early 80's.
Slashdot Mirror
Summary: unless you're a company officer or other absolutely essential employee, you probably don't need to worry about it. -- Kris
Does anyone know the outcome of the Alabama vote to eliminate its constitutional ban on interracial marriage?
Figure out what you want to do, and then figure out how to make money at it. Don't worry about whether your starting salary will be $40,000 or $50,000 (or $25,000); focus on choosing a career path that will keep you happy.
The anchor asked the correspondent how a write-in vote is handled, and the correspondent didn't know.
Sorry, I don't remember where these machines were.
Neither discipline is intended to turn out "coders", which I assume means "people who can write programs to solve problems". The purpose of college/university is higher education, not job training. If you just need "coders", hire a few bright high school kids and give them copies of "Learn Visual Basic In Two Days" or whatever.
You also get lots of free storage space by creating free web pages at www.tripod.com, www.geocities.com, etc.
Of course, the downside to this is that you can only access stuff when your Internet connection is up. But the fact that I can access this stuff from practically anywhere is a big plus, even if my computer blows up, my house burns down, or whatever.
I'd suggest using PGP or GnuPG to encrypt any sensitive data you upload to sites such as these. Trust no one.
Not true. When you compile a CORBA application, the resulting object modules will only be linkable with a single ORB's libraries. BOA, POA, and CORBAservices don't help with this. BTW, what's faster than vtables? -- Kris
(Before someone flames me: I'd like an open gaming platform--I'm just pointing out Sony's strategy and explaining why they wouldn't want people to "develop freely for their closed platform".)
CORBA, on the other hand, strives to be independent of languages, operating systems, and other platform-specific issues. So the OMG has stayed away from low-level binary bindings.
There are good reasons for CORBA's focus on platform independence, but the downside is that there is no standard way to load components from a shared library and access them. Some ORB products do provide this capability, but they are not interoperable. (For example, if you build a DLL that uses MICO, you probably can't use it from an application written that uses Orbit, omniORB or TAO.)
Check out the comp.object.corba newsgroup archives for more information about this. This subject comes up a lot--someone asks "Why can't CORBA do what COM does", and someone replies "COM sucks. Microsoft sucks. Why on earth would you want to do what they do?"
I'd find this much more useful than a tiny color screen.
I actually did use my old Macintosh SE as a doorstop for a while. But I don't think anyone got the joke.
Right now, most people do not use signatures, and so anyone who does is considered to be "weird" and is therefore under suspicion. If everyone used signed messages all the time, then it would not be suspicious behavior. It's a little like using envelopes for mail instead of using postcards. People who use envelopes aren't necessarily trying to hide something, and since everyone uses them, no one notices.
You are absolutely right to see that RMS considers the license to be of paramount importance. He has said that he would rather use bad free software than good non-free software.
It's certainly true that other community leaders like Eric S. Raymond and Linus Torvalds have a more corporate-friendly attitude, and different philosophies. But I don't see how you can say that RMS's argument is "flawed". He just has goals that differ from those of you and your clients.
And it's not completely without precedent. Companies that stop using trademarks can lose the exclusive rights to them.
And large companies might actually support this idea. The big megamedia giants like Disney are always selling things, so they can keep their copyrights forever. But they can start pillaging the works of less-successful authors and companies that have gone out of business.
This is really not meant to be a troll. I actually want to know if I am missing something here.
My point is that design of secure protocols is hard work. Too many people just say "Well, we can encrypt such-and-such: that makes it secure." It's not that easy. Reading through Schneier's and other authors' books presents lots of interesting protocols. But note how many of those protocols were initially thought to be secure, and were later found to have holes.
And I don't see how crypto would help with go, chess, or tic-tac-toe, as there is nothing "hidden" from either player in those games.
But I think the reason that open-source never took off on the Mac is that it didn't have a "real operating system". No preemptive multitasking, no protected memory, no IPC, no way to do quick-and-dirty command line programs. In short, not like UNIX.
I'm not criticizing the Mac, but most of the really cool open-source projects over the past 10-20 years have been UNIX-based, and the Mac just didn't attract any of the people who were working on them, because it didn't support their style of programming and didn't seem like a worthwhile platform. Let's face it--it's easier to port UNIX-style apps to MS-DOS than it is to port them to the Mac.
Maybe with OS X, this will change.
You can check out the patent here: http://www.patents.ibm.com/deta ils?&pn=US05487616__. You might also be interested in the related patents, for one-handed keyboards and other character-input devices.
But it still pales in comparison to Graffiti input. The main problem with keyboard tapping is that you have to look at the keyboard while doing it. With Graffiti, your eyes are free. (Like touch-typing.)
For those who have trouble getting Grafitti to recognize their handwriting, I'd recommend TealScript.
But we should be careful, or some day Charleton Heston will have to say "Get your claws off of me, you damn dirty parrot!"
And it's rumored that 1.2 will be released under an open-source license!!!
Meta-meta-moderation?
Kernels, file systems, network stacks, etc. are just things that geeks want to argue about.
I wouldn't consider this to be "confusion". Something that Mac people got right is a focus on user perceptions rather than upon implementation details.
Could someone point out exactly what part of the patent describes "hyperlinks"? It talks a lot about using keys, but the patent really seems to describe those VideoText systems that failed so miserably in the early 80's.