You mean that if google has a gmail server sitting in Germany that it won't be able to access all the content on that server? What?
If some NSA/FBI/CIA goon walks into an google/yahoo/whatever office in the US and hands a secret court order for a US citizen to dig through the German server the guy is going to dig through the German server. If anything a google run German based server is actually more legally friendly to the CIA/NSA as now they can be fairly certain they aren't trolling through US-US communications.
So if the US passed a law tomorrow (that was actually obeyed) that 100% banned any interception of communications of one US citizen with another then setting up European only servers would be something the NSA would want Google to to.
If Europe is truly serious about defending their privacy they would insist upon audited servers stationed in Europe run by natural born European citizens with single nationality and no family or economic ties outside of their legal reach. Then they would need to make a ferociously punitive fine for any employes, management, or companies that violate these privacy rights with a huge portion of the fines going to any whistleblower.
Another suggestion I have is for some European company to buy blackberry and make those phones truly and uncompromisingly secure with features such as one time pads.
I have been using Linux since an early Slackware dist and have probably tried 8-10 variants in the years since. I never heard of Red Flag Linux; not once; not even a tiny once.
They needed more cowbell or something. All CS courses should have an MBA in a weekend course. Generally I rail at the MBA mentality but there are a few useful takeaways in a business course (just shouldn't be the 4 years of psychopathic indoctrination).
If you are looking to get a job with a big faceless corporation their HR department will probably be quite happy if you have some paper. Even if the job has requirements such as Node.js or MongoDB I suspect they would prefer if you were somehow "certified" in these areas.
But if I were hiring someone I would just say, "Prove it." by basically having the person show me something interesting they built using the technologies claimed.
Beyond that the key is families of knowledge. C# probably shows you know some Microsoft stuff. C++ means you can learn things like PHP, Java, and Lua quickly. Node.js shows that you are interested in new things, Python is just handy, and Lisp shows that you are an academic of old. One SQL DB is good but two shows you can learn. OpenGL means that you have progressed past script monkey stage.
But the real key is to see the spread of knowledge. There is nothing worse than someone who has "mastered" only one thing or one thing and its related thing. So it is fine to be a master in PHP and MySQL as long as you are good in something quite different such as C++. And it doesn't count if you moved from one related technology to another such as Ruby to PHP or ASP to Ruby.
So you have mastered firmware in C++ which seems to be pretty hard core. My suggestion is to go way off the reservation and learn something like OpenGL programming in Python (as a suggestion of something very different not as a particular suggestion) even though your skillset would probably translated best to something like Java which, if learned, is highly marketable. Python oddly enough is not as marketable. But make sure to learn a DB as I suspect that you didn't do any DB work with firmware.
Exactly, But they are often hired for a project that is similar to their doctoral work and if that project does not involve growth but a single long term delivery and potentially its maintenance then all that ability to do independent study becomes meaningless. Then the company has a PhD who has a PhD in buggy whips and now they are depending upon him to guide them through internal combustion. As I said, many of the PhDs in CS that I know are always near the leading edge. But many that I worked with got their degree in the 80's or 90's and left their brains back in those decades. But their present bodies were still carrying that degree around; generating statements such as "Javascript isn't a real language." and with that dismissing the idea of making a website interesting or functional. But then being ticked that they couldn't make a web page using ADA or something.
One horrible lesson that I have learned in my years of product development is that a well sold product is generally far superior to a well built product. Super bonus if you can do a great job of selling a great product but from a business perspective if you can choose only one then choose sales.
As a finicky developer this burns my soul. A simple proof of this is to look at the various leaked code bases for highly successful products that have appeared on the net over the years. Generally they are of extremely low quality. Then you hear of successful companies doing things like storing passwords in plaintext, sql injection attacks, or truncating passwords to 8 characters; these are not signs of well built products. Some might argue that their products low quality might bite them in the ass but the reality is that after their wild success they can assign teams to clean things up as they catch fire and maybe after a while all the worst stuff will have burned.
But the key is that something is delivered, something with minimal and shaky functionality but something. In my example they basically never delivered, thus crossing the line from a high sales to development ratio to simply con artists.
Years ago I interviewed for this hot up and coming company. Their stock was on fire and after a series of interview with all the top guys they had me in a meeting where they presented a pretty damn good offer. But in that same meeting they finally dished on their "secret weapon" Lotus notes. I just about threw up. They had this PhD CS guy who was their "Expert" I basically said, using Lotus on a project of this nature is like building a car out of sand. In the first few hours you might make something that looks like it is going to be a car but you will never drive it one inch. Their "Expert" made a face like I farted and told me that I knew not of what I spoke; even though I just just finished a project that required digging the guts(business logic and data) out of a lotus notes database and making it actually work in a sane development environment. So they basically said that it didn't look like it was going to work out and I said something like, even without me rethink your choice of Lotus.
About 2 years later they flamed out in a huge stock and legal disaster. The lawsuits and criminal investigations are still moving along after many many years. A critical part of their disaster was their complete inability to deliver what they promised to their biggest customers/investors. Not that they were unable to deliver exactly what was promised but basically deliver anything.
Another PhD CS "Expert" I later dealt with was a fan of some stupid browser and insisted that any development be done for that browser and not others.
But my favorite PhD "Expert" shoot down was one that worked for a company that I worked for, she was an expert in DSP. But after years of working in a dark room somewhere basically everything she knew could be purchased in a chip. In the end she was doing paperwork audits.
I am not saying that PhD CS people are all useless. I know many who are damn good and doing cool useful things. Just that many people in the business world are blinded by a PhD, they assume that the person has some sort of magical ability to make things happen. A PhD basically indicates that they know a whole lot about some certain thing at a certain time. If your business is that thing and their knowledge is recent then great. The reality is that things move so damn quick in the CS world that anyone who is good is always keeping up to date and doubtfully has any paper to show that.
I can't imagine the discoveries, but I can imagine who is going to make them. It will be some person in a complete backwater who uses something really cool in an innovative way to make a slew of discoveries.
I'm willing to bet that if you put 100 pilots with what ever your hours were into your problem that many would have turned it into a disaster. Many would have been fine, some would have just gone IFR, some would have done what you did, some would have found something new, but many would have had an "unexpected contact with the ground."
But being a bureaucrat helps to have a successful flying career; until you and all your passengers die. I can say unequivocally that the worst paper pushers had the best flying careers. I think that Chuck Yeager is a prime example. He only became a pilot because of a one-off fluky experiment that the air force did at the dawn of WWII. People like him are not wanted by any aviation authority in the world.
I was taking a flying test in an area where I didn't know it very well. The tester had me down low for a fictional low ceiling and asked me to navigate back to the airport (he wanted me to use the instruments). I just turned and followed the highway. He asked what I was doing and I said, "There are a few hills around here at our height but none are near the highway. This highway runs straight to the airport and also parallel and thus I will be lined up for landing. Following a highway is easier than screwing with my instruments and at this altitude I want the least screwing around inside the cockpit as possible." I could tell that he was disappointed with my "out of the box" thinking. So he just had us go higher and using the instruments navigate somewhere else.
And yes box canyons are a fantastic way to not only crash but to know you are going to crash minutes before you do. But again a quick bit of out of the box thinking in a box canyon is to just land. A forced landing of your choosing is way better than a crash of the canyon wall's choosing. This is where the rule following pilots end up dead, and the yahoos end up feeling stupid that they flew into a box canyon, but alive. The rule being that you don't deliberately crash a plane that could keep on flying (for another minute or so).
And yes unexpected IFR probably kills way too many pilots. But again it might be better as the IFR comes in to just land in a field somewhere. But pilots live in fear of an aviation investigation. So a forced landing in a field or highway will get pilots in so much trouble that instead pilots will just plow on into the mist and end up dying as as to avoid "breaking the rules."
You need to be able to make mistakes and just laugh and say, "Won't do that stupid again." Just as your getting an IFR rating was the obvious and common sense solution to a near disaster. But the bureaucrats solution would be to try and hunt people like yourself down when you made that mistake and either pull your license or give you a fine.
I think that I should have been a bit more clear. Some rules are 100% needed; traffic patterns around say JFK. But in Upperbuttwater's grass strip airport you don't need many rules. And as for the old farts who are good, as I said, flying is really really easy. Flying for a long time doesn't mean that you are good, just lucky. Eventually every pilot will be challenged with something beyond their control and at that point there is a separation between the good and the dead. Then there is just plain common sense as opposed to recklessness. If your engine is smoking and the propeller has cracks and you fly then that is wreckless. But if you consider yourself a good mechanic and your plane hasn't been seen by a certified mechanic in 20,000 hours then I say good for you.
On top of that though there are really crappy pilots. I love watching Youtube/liveleak videos of planes crashing; mainly to learn from their mistakes. But in many many crashes you can see the crash coming from a mile away. It is 100% clear from the moment they try to get the front wheel up that their weight and balance is way out. But the moron keeps going and the plane goes up up up DOWN. Then you get the fact that aviation equipment manufacturers are under a huge amount of liability pressure. This actually results in way less safety. For instance a huge number of pilots land gear up by accident. But a simple solution is to have a little radar that screams bloody murder if you get close to the ground with the gear up. I could probably build that for $100. But to get a legitimate one for your airplane is prohibitive. The same with other cool technologies like Heads Up Displays. Glass cockpits. And so on.
I remember when I was flying that GPS technology was just getting into planes. There was a huge amount of pressure to keep GPS out of planes because it "might" be unreliable. But I was certain that some 150 hour pilot lost in a storm was going to be able to work a GPS a whole lot easier than they were going to be able to shoot a VOR while flying their unplanned IFR flight in turbulent conditions. I haven't been in small airplanes for a while but I am hoping that GPS is the rule and that VORs and ADF are either gone or demoted.
The same with twin engined flying. They made a big stink about getting and keeping your twin engine certification. But from what I gather the stats of engine failure causing an accident is fantastically higher than the incidence of pilots screwing up with two engines. Plus with a good computer helping there should effectively be no way to screw up. But there seemed to be this attitude that twin engines was playing with the "big boys" and thus needed this magical certification. Again I knew many a moron who could had a multi-engine certification. To me this was just like flight engineers trying to hold on to their jobs in the early 70s.
Now IFR that was hard (as indicated by an actual failure rate) so having an IFR certification was probably a good idea.
I was a pilot many years ago and heard aviation stories from the 60s and before. Those stories basically had lots of people having fun with their airplanes. Many people flew crappy old airplanes that they either fixed themselves or knew someone who could fix them. Maybe an old mechanic from WWII. The planes ran on car gas and people generally knew the limitations of these planes. In many cases a license was a formality which after many years of flying people might go in and get their license.
But by the time I was flying the cowboys were mostly gone and the rule books were out and self righteous people ran around thumping the rule books like they were bibles. So instead of training people to have safe fun, a private pilots license was all about creating little airline pilots. There was this foolish belief that enough rules and enough training would keep people from augering in. I have read that small plane manufactured in 2014 will have insurance as nearly 50% of its cost. This might be important for a plane used in commercial passenger services but the reality is that if I were to get back into flying it would be for fun. A great safety mechanism is actually available to put into crappy airplanes and that is a parachute. Yes there are parachutes for the small planes themselves; wing falls off, pull the chute. This almost makes small planes idiot proof.
The funny thing is that in my few years of flying I found out how to figure out who was going to die. If they were perfectionists who talked endlessly about following the rules and how yahoos were giving pilots a bad name and wanted ever greater training and certifications they were dead the first time something went wrong. These were people who would have an engine failure and pick the absolute worst place to have a forced landing. Or do a perfect forced landing with all the perfect radio patter, until they flew into the high tension power lines.
But the people who thought that half of their checklist was done by farting and burping, and were just as happy to take off from a taxiway were basically immortal.
To give a great example there were a crew of drug smugglers about 40 minutes of flying from my home base who owned a bunch of crappy planes that they ducktaped together and they took off and landed on these hilly dirt roads and only one license among the lot of them. After 30 years of activity the only thing that shut them down was being arrested for the smuggling part. No crashes.
But at my flying school we made bets as to who would crash and wrote their names on a wall. About 15 years after leaving I got an out of the blue letter from the guy who managed the airport and he included a letter with about 80% of the names crossed off. They had all had a serious crash. It was dead easy to identify these guys. They were typically around 50, slightly portly, had that cop look, and always had a mustache. They took flying way too seriously and would say things like, "You aren't ready for that." The that being something that wasn't actually much, just more than they had.
The reality is that flying is really really easy. Any monkey can learn to fly. Few people who enter flying school will fail, they might chicken out or run out of money but few will fail. But what is basically impossible to train for and certainly not tested is keeping a cool head. When things go wrong, your training will help but you have to adapt. Sometimes you are handed an easy emergency such as engine failure at altitude. But often you are handed something such as a partial elevator failure that could be potentially handled by quickly changed the center of mass of the airplane (moving everyone to the back) and then using the throttle as for pitch control. But you don't train for that; you can't. You just have to be able to say, nothing I know is going to work, what can I do. But if you are a rule book thumping dogmatist all you have to hang on to is that someone is to blame for this and they are going to pay.
Now very tiny planes have far fewer rules but quite simply they should designate certain(most) airspaces as near rule free zones. Fly what you want how you want and have fun; do this and you will have people 3D printing something that will blow your mind.
I think have hit on a hugely important factor. By having many different manufacturers there is no worry about ARM playing some games like cutting you off, or strongarming you into some new marketing ploy. If one manufacturer tries to screw you there are many others happy to do business.
On a side note the server I have long been waiting for is a 16+ CPU arm server. A typical web site is continuously getting a zillion microscopic requests that shouldn't trouble a low end ARM chip. So why not spread them out across a bunch of CPUs? Plus you can power down the bulk of the chips during slow periods.
They have this new 8-core 64-bit Seattle chip that sounds like it is a beast. It is 1/10th the cost of a similar Xeon chip. I would much prefer a server with 10 of those than one Xeon. Think of that 80 cores running PHP scripts. The response time under load of that server would be fantastic.
I love that ARM didn't initially go head to head with Intel and thus ended up not getting crushed by them (think transmeta/AMD). I thus have hopes that this not only works because it is cool but because ARM is cool and deserves another win for what they have done.
Ah but the key is that the open source community needed to cook up the bulk of those drivers and often without the cooperation of the hardware manufacturer. Of late the manufacturers have a higher chance of either cooperating or actually cooking up their own OS drivers. The key is that MS could sit back and effectively let this asset build up it would be sort of like all the guide books, yellow pages, and travel websites only ever mentioned your hotel chain and ignored the others. You wouldn't get 100% of the business but you would get most of it.
So with things like ARM they are in unfamiliar territory. Especially where they traditionally had less to do with driver development, whereas Linux drivers have been a long hard slog and multi-platform has generally been the rule not the exception.
If I had to name Microsoft's top assets I would say that market share inertia has been their number one asset with drivers as their number two. Things like brand and whatnot are all far behind those two. As a long time user of Mac and Linux drivers has always been something that I have been aware of. Before buying any hardware I have generally checked to make sure that it would be fine.
One of the greatest strengths Microsoft has had was its library of drivers. Quite simply most manufacturers would be foolish to make their drivers for anything but Windows first and foremost. Thus when a company would deploy their resources they could ask the question is it better to spend some resources for porting the drivers to things like Linux or just put more effort into the Windows version. Thus at best the Linux version (if any) played second fiddle to Windows (or third after Mac).
This resulted in Microsoft effectively having billions of dollars worth of drivers that they didn't even have to pay for; a serious competitive advantage. But as many power users have moved over to Linux for various needs such as servers, rendering, and large scale computing; certain classes of drivers have become valuable for hardware manufacturers to port properly (or assist in the porting).
This won't kill Windows but it is a nice step toward leveling the playing field somewhat.
In the past(late 90s early 2000s) the various machines that I had barely worked. So I noodled and fiddled until the machine was just the way I liked it. But then at some point, I largely stopped. Basically the machines were powerful enough that tweaking didn't buy me any critical functionality or performance to make it worth my time. Also the defaults for almost any OS are close enough that my total "tweaking" might take 5 minutes or less from a default configuration.
In many ways I think that it less that we don't tweak as the machines are coming pre-tweaked.
Obviously this is not for everyone as we all know those people who must spend a full day getting a new machine just the way they like it.
But if I had a new machine built from scratch tomorrow I would say that 50 percent of the few minutes of tweaking would be spent changing the IDE defaults for a few keys and whatnot. The bulk of the rest would be eliminating stupid default icons and putting up a few that I frequently use (Terminal, etc)
I just spun up a raspberry pi and with the arduino IDE sitting right on the desktop I'm not sure that I'll make a single change at this point. Any changes going forward will be 100% in support of critical functionality.
It strikes me as odd that this many people would go bad. Maybe the tests were a joke they were so hard so everybody just winked and cheated; otherwise the place might have been empty with a bunch of people "failing" for no good reason.
A good example of this is apparently in China nearly everyone bribes to get a driver's license. The test is pretty much impossible. I read that some people try to take it as a challenge. For example some of the questions on the test have exactly opposite correct answers to what is essentially the same question.
The problem is that once you make it impossible to pass, forcing them to cheat, then people might not study the material at all; the result being that the people end up knowing even less than if they were just offered an easier test.
The market shares of Firefox and Chrome that aren't up to date barely amount to a single digit (1). Safari has a bit more of a tail and I must admit that I don't test that tail. But IE stats are smeared out across many versions.
I read about a company that charged extra to IE customers to pay for the extra site development required. I suspect that the true meaning of their message was, "Come back with a different browser and we hope you will be a permanent convert."
Nearly every time I do cross platform testing, it is Firefox-yup, Safari-yup, Chrome-yup, IE-NOPE. I don't remember the last time I made a browser conditional if statement for the first three but nearly always I find that with IE I have to resort to the awfulness that is browser conditional javascript.
Now with IE10 things are pretty good but due to the huge prevalence of 7, 8, 9 (and in some corporations, even 6). But this has been years of being smashed in the teeth by IE, So I am not glad to see it go away because of any problems with IE10/11 but like the wall street bankers past actions, MS had it coming.
Then there is the whole "think different" concept. While google docs is not at all comparable to MS Office or even open office, it far exceeds most people's needs. Plus it is really easy for a bunch of people to work on a single document. If I were a student today, I would strongly look at using a combination of google docs, google drive, and some basic.doc file editor such as bean.
I have long argued that doing a MS style feature for feature checklist is completely stupid. Unless someone comes up with an AI format duplication tool, there will never be an office product that is 100% compatible with the crazy thing that is a word doc. I suspect the MS would have trouble writing a real spec for the.doc file format and then a program(from scratch) that would faithfully open a word document as was produced on one of their own versions of word.
But seeing that all but the most serious of power users are basically happy with features found in Word 97 then I suggest to go sideways and not try to emulate word. But to use the awesome power of a modern machine/network to solve the actual problems that people have that caused them to create an office document.
To a tiny extent this is what google docs is now doing. Technically multiple people can edit a word document but that first requires word, then some sort of network fiddling, and finally the knowhow to do it. Sharing a google word document is brain dead easy and all you need is a browser. This plus google drive and you are even safe if you lose internet. Also google docs is a bit mobile friendly whereas good luck doing any MS office work on almost any mobile device.
While there are many problems with Google docs I see that it will become a better product that I am more likely to use while Office heads off in a direction that wants lots of my money and thus I am less likely to use.
Don't get me wrong. I don't see google docs as the be all and end all but products like it are going to win in the end. Unless Office is willing to change they are going to be a niche product for people who have unusually complicated document needs. This is simply evidenced by the plummeting sales of PCs.
The switch to Linux is not about open office. The simple reality is that most people create very basic documents and don't need much more than a basic text editor with fonts and spell check. Most enterprise software is now web based and thus all the average government machine needs is a web browser. So paying for a Windows license an a word license for a zillion machines that don't need either is just throwing money into the toilet. Plus once you dip your machine into the OSS world people often find that all kinds of commercial software needs can be replaced. Email systems, scheduling systems, VPNs, etc.
While there will be a handful of machines that need to remain windows I suspect that it would be significantly less than 1% and even then they will be in clusters such as an accounting office.
But some of the greatest advantages of OSS is that you no longer have an onerous license audit problem. Basically you point to your dozen accountants hold up a dozen 5 year old MS licenses and tell the auditors to go to hell as you don't even plan on upgrading office for another 5-10 years.
As one government official said directly to Bill Gates, OSS gave them freedom from Gates himself.
What I can't wait to laugh at are all the MS white papers that claim that this will somehow cost the UK more money than they presently spend on MS software. Quite simply these white papers are driven by the hysterical realization that the MS business model of taxing governments and businesses worldwide is nearing an end. People now have realistic options.
But the tears will be even more real as many governments and enterprises the world round will be dumping MS not out of a desire to save money but a desire to keep their computers from being spied upon by US entities.
When I was in Junior High a large group of parents protested to the Minister of Education that the school principal was basically insane. The Minister agreed, in that he was already aware of his nuttiness. He said, "We can't fire him but we are going to make him a useless Vice Principal (one of 13) at the giant high school." So he sat in a office doing nothing for a few years except trying to ruin the lives of whatever students rubbed him the wrong way.
So a couple of years later I am watching the national news and there is that same loser but now he is the Principal of the High School and has just finished squabbling with a student over french fries.
I was lucky that he never noticed me but when he targeted a student he would repeatedly call the police on them (odd in the Canadian system) and do his damnedest to make sure that their lives were destroyed. Months of detention (often overruled by the principal), plus encouraging teachers to "investigate" the students for any wrong doing. His favorite target seemed to be students from broken homes.
In my years from school and watching my daughters go through the system I have seen highly dysfunctional teachers who were embedded in the system like ticks. What makes it so much worse it that supremely fantastic teachers are not only beaten down by these losers who usually have tons of seniority but they are often chased out of the system by these parasites.
The key is that we are all a bunch of monkeys. In an open area with lots of other monkeys we will play our monkey games such as watching for predators, seeing who is grooming whom, etc. This is all very distracting. So we try to raise the walls of the cubicles higher which helps a bit. The best open concept that I have been in were when small teams(5-7) were grouped in large walled offices. The worst was in a long office that was open all the way down to a dead end with the bosses all having the best window offices. So you had not too many places with a view but people walking by you all day. It sucked. Headphones didn't change people moving in the corner of your eye.
In cubeville I have noticed that many workers hunch right over their desks with headphones on trying to shut out the useless distractions around. The best is when the bosses themselves walk around being the distraction (because they are lonely in their offices) and then ban headphones because it makes it harder for them to interrupt their drones.
The only licences I like are LGPL, MIT, BSD, etc. So basically licenses that don't restrict me in any significant way. I don't like GPL and certainly wouldn't have anything to do with these CLAs.
What these bozos seem to forget is that while their software is free and they might fell all righteous in providing it, I don't have to either use it or contribute to their project. There are zillions of options, and zillions of projects that aren't trying to screw me if I contribute; I wonder which one that most people will end up choosing?
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You mean that if google has a gmail server sitting in Germany that it won't be able to access all the content on that server? What?
If some NSA/FBI/CIA goon walks into an google/yahoo/whatever office in the US and hands a secret court order for a US citizen to dig through the German server the guy is going to dig through the German server. If anything a google run German based server is actually more legally friendly to the CIA/NSA as now they can be fairly certain they aren't trolling through US-US communications.
So if the US passed a law tomorrow (that was actually obeyed) that 100% banned any interception of communications of one US citizen with another then setting up European only servers would be something the NSA would want Google to to.
If Europe is truly serious about defending their privacy they would insist upon audited servers stationed in Europe run by natural born European citizens with single nationality and no family or economic ties outside of their legal reach. Then they would need to make a ferociously punitive fine for any employes, management, or companies that violate these privacy rights with a huge portion of the fines going to any whistleblower.
Another suggestion I have is for some European company to buy blackberry and make those phones truly and uncompromisingly secure with features such as one time pads.
I have been using Linux since an early Slackware dist and have probably tried 8-10 variants in the years since. I never heard of Red Flag Linux; not once; not even a tiny once.
They needed more cowbell or something. All CS courses should have an MBA in a weekend course. Generally I rail at the MBA mentality but there are a few useful takeaways in a business course (just shouldn't be the 4 years of psychopathic indoctrination).
If you are looking to get a job with a big faceless corporation their HR department will probably be quite happy if you have some paper. Even if the job has requirements such as Node.js or MongoDB I suspect they would prefer if you were somehow "certified" in these areas.
But if I were hiring someone I would just say, "Prove it." by basically having the person show me something interesting they built using the technologies claimed.
Beyond that the key is families of knowledge. C# probably shows you know some Microsoft stuff. C++ means you can learn things like PHP, Java, and Lua quickly. Node.js shows that you are interested in new things, Python is just handy, and Lisp shows that you are an academic of old. One SQL DB is good but two shows you can learn. OpenGL means that you have progressed past script monkey stage.
But the real key is to see the spread of knowledge. There is nothing worse than someone who has "mastered" only one thing or one thing and its related thing. So it is fine to be a master in PHP and MySQL as long as you are good in something quite different such as C++. And it doesn't count if you moved from one related technology to another such as Ruby to PHP or ASP to Ruby.
So you have mastered firmware in C++ which seems to be pretty hard core. My suggestion is to go way off the reservation and learn something like OpenGL programming in Python (as a suggestion of something very different not as a particular suggestion) even though your skillset would probably translated best to something like Java which, if learned, is highly marketable. Python oddly enough is not as marketable. But make sure to learn a DB as I suspect that you didn't do any DB work with firmware.
Exactly, But they are often hired for a project that is similar to their doctoral work and if that project does not involve growth but a single long term delivery and potentially its maintenance then all that ability to do independent study becomes meaningless. Then the company has a PhD who has a PhD in buggy whips and now they are depending upon him to guide them through internal combustion. As I said, many of the PhDs in CS that I know are always near the leading edge. But many that I worked with got their degree in the 80's or 90's and left their brains back in those decades. But their present bodies were still carrying that degree around; generating statements such as "Javascript isn't a real language." and with that dismissing the idea of making a website interesting or functional. But then being ticked that they couldn't make a web page using ADA or something.
One horrible lesson that I have learned in my years of product development is that a well sold product is generally far superior to a well built product. Super bonus if you can do a great job of selling a great product but from a business perspective if you can choose only one then choose sales.
As a finicky developer this burns my soul. A simple proof of this is to look at the various leaked code bases for highly successful products that have appeared on the net over the years. Generally they are of extremely low quality. Then you hear of successful companies doing things like storing passwords in plaintext, sql injection attacks, or truncating passwords to 8 characters; these are not signs of well built products. Some might argue that their products low quality might bite them in the ass but the reality is that after their wild success they can assign teams to clean things up as they catch fire and maybe after a while all the worst stuff will have burned.
But the key is that something is delivered, something with minimal and shaky functionality but something. In my example they basically never delivered, thus crossing the line from a high sales to development ratio to simply con artists.
Years ago I interviewed for this hot up and coming company. Their stock was on fire and after a series of interview with all the top guys they had me in a meeting where they presented a pretty damn good offer. But in that same meeting they finally dished on their "secret weapon" Lotus notes. I just about threw up. They had this PhD CS guy who was their "Expert" I basically said, using Lotus on a project of this nature is like building a car out of sand. In the first few hours you might make something that looks like it is going to be a car but you will never drive it one inch. Their "Expert" made a face like I farted and told me that I knew not of what I spoke; even though I just just finished a project that required digging the guts(business logic and data) out of a lotus notes database and making it actually work in a sane development environment. So they basically said that it didn't look like it was going to work out and I said something like, even without me rethink your choice of Lotus.
About 2 years later they flamed out in a huge stock and legal disaster. The lawsuits and criminal investigations are still moving along after many many years. A critical part of their disaster was their complete inability to deliver what they promised to their biggest customers/investors. Not that they were unable to deliver exactly what was promised but basically deliver anything.
Another PhD CS "Expert" I later dealt with was a fan of some stupid browser and insisted that any development be done for that browser and not others.
But my favorite PhD "Expert" shoot down was one that worked for a company that I worked for, she was an expert in DSP. But after years of working in a dark room somewhere basically everything she knew could be purchased in a chip. In the end she was doing paperwork audits.
I am not saying that PhD CS people are all useless. I know many who are damn good and doing cool useful things. Just that many people in the business world are blinded by a PhD, they assume that the person has some sort of magical ability to make things happen. A PhD basically indicates that they know a whole lot about some certain thing at a certain time. If your business is that thing and their knowledge is recent then great. The reality is that things move so damn quick in the CS world that anyone who is good is always keeping up to date and doubtfully has any paper to show that.
I can't imagine the discoveries, but I can imagine who is going to make them. It will be some person in a complete backwater who uses something really cool in an innovative way to make a slew of discoveries.
I'm willing to bet that if you put 100 pilots with what ever your hours were into your problem that many would have turned it into a disaster. Many would have been fine, some would have just gone IFR, some would have done what you did, some would have found something new, but many would have had an "unexpected contact with the ground."
But being a bureaucrat helps to have a successful flying career; until you and all your passengers die. I can say unequivocally that the worst paper pushers had the best flying careers. I think that Chuck Yeager is a prime example. He only became a pilot because of a one-off fluky experiment that the air force did at the dawn of WWII. People like him are not wanted by any aviation authority in the world.
I was taking a flying test in an area where I didn't know it very well. The tester had me down low for a fictional low ceiling and asked me to navigate back to the airport (he wanted me to use the instruments). I just turned and followed the highway. He asked what I was doing and I said, "There are a few hills around here at our height but none are near the highway. This highway runs straight to the airport and also parallel and thus I will be lined up for landing. Following a highway is easier than screwing with my instruments and at this altitude I want the least screwing around inside the cockpit as possible." I could tell that he was disappointed with my "out of the box" thinking. So he just had us go higher and using the instruments navigate somewhere else.
And yes box canyons are a fantastic way to not only crash but to know you are going to crash minutes before you do. But again a quick bit of out of the box thinking in a box canyon is to just land. A forced landing of your choosing is way better than a crash of the canyon wall's choosing. This is where the rule following pilots end up dead, and the yahoos end up feeling stupid that they flew into a box canyon, but alive. The rule being that you don't deliberately crash a plane that could keep on flying (for another minute or so).
And yes unexpected IFR probably kills way too many pilots. But again it might be better as the IFR comes in to just land in a field somewhere. But pilots live in fear of an aviation investigation. So a forced landing in a field or highway will get pilots in so much trouble that instead pilots will just plow on into the mist and end up dying as as to avoid "breaking the rules."
You need to be able to make mistakes and just laugh and say, "Won't do that stupid again." Just as your getting an IFR rating was the obvious and common sense solution to a near disaster. But the bureaucrats solution would be to try and hunt people like yourself down when you made that mistake and either pull your license or give you a fine.
I think that I should have been a bit more clear. Some rules are 100% needed; traffic patterns around say JFK. But in Upperbuttwater's grass strip airport you don't need many rules. And as for the old farts who are good, as I said, flying is really really easy. Flying for a long time doesn't mean that you are good, just lucky. Eventually every pilot will be challenged with something beyond their control and at that point there is a separation between the good and the dead. Then there is just plain common sense as opposed to recklessness. If your engine is smoking and the propeller has cracks and you fly then that is wreckless. But if you consider yourself a good mechanic and your plane hasn't been seen by a certified mechanic in 20,000 hours then I say good for you.
On top of that though there are really crappy pilots. I love watching Youtube/liveleak videos of planes crashing; mainly to learn from their mistakes. But in many many crashes you can see the crash coming from a mile away. It is 100% clear from the moment they try to get the front wheel up that their weight and balance is way out. But the moron keeps going and the plane goes up up up DOWN. Then you get the fact that aviation equipment manufacturers are under a huge amount of liability pressure. This actually results in way less safety. For instance a huge number of pilots land gear up by accident. But a simple solution is to have a little radar that screams bloody murder if you get close to the ground with the gear up. I could probably build that for $100. But to get a legitimate one for your airplane is prohibitive. The same with other cool technologies like Heads Up Displays. Glass cockpits. And so on.
I remember when I was flying that GPS technology was just getting into planes. There was a huge amount of pressure to keep GPS out of planes because it "might" be unreliable. But I was certain that some 150 hour pilot lost in a storm was going to be able to work a GPS a whole lot easier than they were going to be able to shoot a VOR while flying their unplanned IFR flight in turbulent conditions. I haven't been in small airplanes for a while but I am hoping that GPS is the rule and that VORs and ADF are either gone or demoted.
The same with twin engined flying. They made a big stink about getting and keeping your twin engine certification. But from what I gather the stats of engine failure causing an accident is fantastically higher than the incidence of pilots screwing up with two engines. Plus with a good computer helping there should effectively be no way to screw up. But there seemed to be this attitude that twin engines was playing with the "big boys" and thus needed this magical certification. Again I knew many a moron who could had a multi-engine certification. To me this was just like flight engineers trying to hold on to their jobs in the early 70s.
Now IFR that was hard (as indicated by an actual failure rate) so having an IFR certification was probably a good idea.
I was a pilot many years ago and heard aviation stories from the 60s and before. Those stories basically had lots of people having fun with their airplanes. Many people flew crappy old airplanes that they either fixed themselves or knew someone who could fix them. Maybe an old mechanic from WWII. The planes ran on car gas and people generally knew the limitations of these planes. In many cases a license was a formality which after many years of flying people might go in and get their license.
But by the time I was flying the cowboys were mostly gone and the rule books were out and self righteous people ran around thumping the rule books like they were bibles. So instead of training people to have safe fun, a private pilots license was all about creating little airline pilots. There was this foolish belief that enough rules and enough training would keep people from augering in. I have read that small plane manufactured in 2014 will have insurance as nearly 50% of its cost. This might be important for a plane used in commercial passenger services but the reality is that if I were to get back into flying it would be for fun. A great safety mechanism is actually available to put into crappy airplanes and that is a parachute. Yes there are parachutes for the small planes themselves; wing falls off, pull the chute. This almost makes small planes idiot proof.
The funny thing is that in my few years of flying I found out how to figure out who was going to die. If they were perfectionists who talked endlessly about following the rules and how yahoos were giving pilots a bad name and wanted ever greater training and certifications they were dead the first time something went wrong. These were people who would have an engine failure and pick the absolute worst place to have a forced landing. Or do a perfect forced landing with all the perfect radio patter, until they flew into the high tension power lines.
But the people who thought that half of their checklist was done by farting and burping, and were just as happy to take off from a taxiway were basically immortal.
To give a great example there were a crew of drug smugglers about 40 minutes of flying from my home base who owned a bunch of crappy planes that they ducktaped together and they took off and landed on these hilly dirt roads and only one license among the lot of them. After 30 years of activity the only thing that shut them down was being arrested for the smuggling part. No crashes.
But at my flying school we made bets as to who would crash and wrote their names on a wall. About 15 years after leaving I got an out of the blue letter from the guy who managed the airport and he included a letter with about 80% of the names crossed off. They had all had a serious crash. It was dead easy to identify these guys. They were typically around 50, slightly portly, had that cop look, and always had a mustache. They took flying way too seriously and would say things like, "You aren't ready for that." The that being something that wasn't actually much, just more than they had.
The reality is that flying is really really easy. Any monkey can learn to fly. Few people who enter flying school will fail, they might chicken out or run out of money but few will fail. But what is basically impossible to train for and certainly not tested is keeping a cool head. When things go wrong, your training will help but you have to adapt. Sometimes you are handed an easy emergency such as engine failure at altitude. But often you are handed something such as a partial elevator failure that could be potentially handled by quickly changed the center of mass of the airplane (moving everyone to the back) and then using the throttle as for pitch control. But you don't train for that; you can't. You just have to be able to say, nothing I know is going to work, what can I do. But if you are a rule book thumping dogmatist all you have to hang on to is that someone is to blame for this and they are going to pay.
Now very tiny planes have far fewer rules but quite simply they should designate certain(most) airspaces as near rule free zones. Fly what you want how you want and have fun; do this and you will have people 3D printing something that will blow your mind.
I think have hit on a hugely important factor. By having many different manufacturers there is no worry about ARM playing some games like cutting you off, or strongarming you into some new marketing ploy. If one manufacturer tries to screw you there are many others happy to do business.
On a side note the server I have long been waiting for is a 16+ CPU arm server. A typical web site is continuously getting a zillion microscopic requests that shouldn't trouble a low end ARM chip. So why not spread them out across a bunch of CPUs? Plus you can power down the bulk of the chips during slow periods.
They have this new 8-core 64-bit Seattle chip that sounds like it is a beast. It is 1/10th the cost of a similar Xeon chip. I would much prefer a server with 10 of those than one Xeon. Think of that 80 cores running PHP scripts. The response time under load of that server would be fantastic.
I love that ARM didn't initially go head to head with Intel and thus ended up not getting crushed by them (think transmeta/AMD). I thus have hopes that this not only works because it is cool but because ARM is cool and deserves another win for what they have done.
Ah but the key is that the open source community needed to cook up the bulk of those drivers and often without the cooperation of the hardware manufacturer. Of late the manufacturers have a higher chance of either cooperating or actually cooking up their own OS drivers. The key is that MS could sit back and effectively let this asset build up it would be sort of like all the guide books, yellow pages, and travel websites only ever mentioned your hotel chain and ignored the others. You wouldn't get 100% of the business but you would get most of it.
So with things like ARM they are in unfamiliar territory. Especially where they traditionally had less to do with driver development, whereas Linux drivers have been a long hard slog and multi-platform has generally been the rule not the exception.
If I had to name Microsoft's top assets I would say that market share inertia has been their number one asset with drivers as their number two. Things like brand and whatnot are all far behind those two. As a long time user of Mac and Linux drivers has always been something that I have been aware of. Before buying any hardware I have generally checked to make sure that it would be fine.
One of the greatest strengths Microsoft has had was its library of drivers. Quite simply most manufacturers would be foolish to make their drivers for anything but Windows first and foremost. Thus when a company would deploy their resources they could ask the question is it better to spend some resources for porting the drivers to things like Linux or just put more effort into the Windows version. Thus at best the Linux version (if any) played second fiddle to Windows (or third after Mac).
This resulted in Microsoft effectively having billions of dollars worth of drivers that they didn't even have to pay for; a serious competitive advantage. But as many power users have moved over to Linux for various needs such as servers, rendering, and large scale computing; certain classes of drivers have become valuable for hardware manufacturers to port properly (or assist in the porting).
This won't kill Windows but it is a nice step toward leveling the playing field somewhat.
In the past(late 90s early 2000s) the various machines that I had barely worked. So I noodled and fiddled until the machine was just the way I liked it. But then at some point, I largely stopped. Basically the machines were powerful enough that tweaking didn't buy me any critical functionality or performance to make it worth my time. Also the defaults for almost any OS are close enough that my total "tweaking" might take 5 minutes or less from a default configuration.
In many ways I think that it less that we don't tweak as the machines are coming pre-tweaked.
Obviously this is not for everyone as we all know those people who must spend a full day getting a new machine just the way they like it.
But if I had a new machine built from scratch tomorrow I would say that 50 percent of the few minutes of tweaking would be spent changing the IDE defaults for a few keys and whatnot. The bulk of the rest would be eliminating stupid default icons and putting up a few that I frequently use (Terminal, etc)
I just spun up a raspberry pi and with the arduino IDE sitting right on the desktop I'm not sure that I'll make a single change at this point. Any changes going forward will be 100% in support of critical functionality.
It strikes me as odd that this many people would go bad. Maybe the tests were a joke they were so hard so everybody just winked and cheated; otherwise the place might have been empty with a bunch of people "failing" for no good reason.
A good example of this is apparently in China nearly everyone bribes to get a driver's license. The test is pretty much impossible. I read that some people try to take it as a challenge. For example some of the questions on the test have exactly opposite correct answers to what is essentially the same question.
The problem is that once you make it impossible to pass, forcing them to cheat, then people might not study the material at all; the result being that the people end up knowing even less than if they were just offered an easier test.
The market shares of Firefox and Chrome that aren't up to date barely amount to a single digit (1). Safari has a bit more of a tail and I must admit that I don't test that tail. But IE stats are smeared out across many versions.
I read about a company that charged extra to IE customers to pay for the extra site development required. I suspect that the true meaning of their message was, "Come back with a different browser and we hope you will be a permanent convert."
Nearly every time I do cross platform testing, it is Firefox-yup, Safari-yup, Chrome-yup, IE-NOPE. I don't remember the last time I made a browser conditional if statement for the first three but nearly always I find that with IE I have to resort to the awfulness that is browser conditional javascript.
Now with IE10 things are pretty good but due to the huge prevalence of 7, 8, 9 (and in some corporations, even 6). But this has been years of being smashed in the teeth by IE, So I am not glad to see it go away because of any problems with IE10/11 but like the wall street bankers past actions, MS had it coming.
Then there is the whole "think different" concept. While google docs is not at all comparable to MS Office or even open office, it far exceeds most people's needs. Plus it is really easy for a bunch of people to work on a single document. If I were a student today, I would strongly look at using a combination of google docs, google drive, and some basic .doc file editor such as bean.
.doc file format and then a program(from scratch) that would faithfully open a word document as was produced on one of their own versions of word.
I have long argued that doing a MS style feature for feature checklist is completely stupid. Unless someone comes up with an AI format duplication tool, there will never be an office product that is 100% compatible with the crazy thing that is a word doc. I suspect the MS would have trouble writing a real spec for the
But seeing that all but the most serious of power users are basically happy with features found in Word 97 then I suggest to go sideways and not try to emulate word. But to use the awesome power of a modern machine/network to solve the actual problems that people have that caused them to create an office document.
To a tiny extent this is what google docs is now doing. Technically multiple people can edit a word document but that first requires word, then some sort of network fiddling, and finally the knowhow to do it. Sharing a google word document is brain dead easy and all you need is a browser. This plus google drive and you are even safe if you lose internet. Also google docs is a bit mobile friendly whereas good luck doing any MS office work on almost any mobile device.
While there are many problems with Google docs I see that it will become a better product that I am more likely to use while Office heads off in a direction that wants lots of my money and thus I am less likely to use.
Don't get me wrong. I don't see google docs as the be all and end all but products like it are going to win in the end. Unless Office is willing to change they are going to be a niche product for people who have unusually complicated document needs. This is simply evidenced by the plummeting sales of PCs.
The switch to Linux is not about open office. The simple reality is that most people create very basic documents and don't need much more than a basic text editor with fonts and spell check. Most enterprise software is now web based and thus all the average government machine needs is a web browser. So paying for a Windows license an a word license for a zillion machines that don't need either is just throwing money into the toilet. Plus once you dip your machine into the OSS world people often find that all kinds of commercial software needs can be replaced. Email systems, scheduling systems, VPNs, etc.
While there will be a handful of machines that need to remain windows I suspect that it would be significantly less than 1% and even then they will be in clusters such as an accounting office.
But some of the greatest advantages of OSS is that you no longer have an onerous license audit problem. Basically you point to your dozen accountants hold up a dozen 5 year old MS licenses and tell the auditors to go to hell as you don't even plan on upgrading office for another 5-10 years.
As one government official said directly to Bill Gates, OSS gave them freedom from Gates himself.
What I can't wait to laugh at are all the MS white papers that claim that this will somehow cost the UK more money than they presently spend on MS software. Quite simply these white papers are driven by the hysterical realization that the MS business model of taxing governments and businesses worldwide is nearing an end. People now have realistic options.
But the tears will be even more real as many governments and enterprises the world round will be dumping MS not out of a desire to save money but a desire to keep their computers from being spied upon by US entities.
When I was in Junior High a large group of parents protested to the Minister of Education that the school principal was basically insane. The Minister agreed, in that he was already aware of his nuttiness. He said, "We can't fire him but we are going to make him a useless Vice Principal (one of 13) at the giant high school." So he sat in a office doing nothing for a few years except trying to ruin the lives of whatever students rubbed him the wrong way.
So a couple of years later I am watching the national news and there is that same loser but now he is the Principal of the High School and has just finished squabbling with a student over french fries.
I was lucky that he never noticed me but when he targeted a student he would repeatedly call the police on them (odd in the Canadian system) and do his damnedest to make sure that their lives were destroyed. Months of detention (often overruled by the principal), plus encouraging teachers to "investigate" the students for any wrong doing. His favorite target seemed to be students from broken homes.
In my years from school and watching my daughters go through the system I have seen highly dysfunctional teachers who were embedded in the system like ticks. What makes it so much worse it that supremely fantastic teachers are not only beaten down by these losers who usually have tons of seniority but they are often chased out of the system by these parasites.
The key is that we are all a bunch of monkeys. In an open area with lots of other monkeys we will play our monkey games such as watching for predators, seeing who is grooming whom, etc. This is all very distracting. So we try to raise the walls of the cubicles higher which helps a bit. The best open concept that I have been in were when small teams(5-7) were grouped in large walled offices. The worst was in a long office that was open all the way down to a dead end with the bosses all having the best window offices. So you had not too many places with a view but people walking by you all day. It sucked. Headphones didn't change people moving in the corner of your eye.
In cubeville I have noticed that many workers hunch right over their desks with headphones on trying to shut out the useless distractions around. The best is when the bosses themselves walk around being the distraction (because they are lonely in their offices) and then ban headphones because it makes it harder for them to interrupt their drones.
The only licences I like are LGPL, MIT, BSD, etc. So basically licenses that don't restrict me in any significant way. I don't like GPL and certainly wouldn't have anything to do with these CLAs.
What these bozos seem to forget is that while their software is free and they might fell all righteous in providing it, I don't have to either use it or contribute to their project. There are zillions of options, and zillions of projects that aren't trying to screw me if I contribute; I wonder which one that most people will end up choosing?