That reminds me a recent exchange I had with Google. Some guy from Google contacted me on linkedin saying Google was interested in my profile. Since my profile is fairly atypical, I am a researcher, a technical consultant, a CEO of a tech start-up, an open-source enthusiast and member of several major standardization efforts, I was wondering what they had to offer.
I gave the guy my number and he called me. It was apparent that he hadn't even read my resume, and when I explained it he didn't seem to understand what I was saying. He actually expected me to resign from my job, freshen up bachelor's level computer science stuff and then come for an interview. He wouldn't even tell me how much they'd be able to pay me; just that "you know, Google has the best, and everyone there is quite satisfied with their salary".
If you're going to try hiring people randomly with keywords on linkedin, a good idea might be to check who you're pitching to.
You might not be the one to come back to it, but other people on the team will. The most important ability of a developer is being able to work in a team. Since most real development happens on large codebases, this means that not only you need to have good tools to find your way in the code, but you also need to ensure your changes don't break anything, in particular other people's code, or if someone broke something for you you need to be able to figure out why. You need to work well with versioning tools, searching and indexing tools, debugging tools, bug reporting tools, reviewing tools, refactoring tools and testing tools. Some of these tools you might have to write yourself specifically for a particular project.
Unfortunately, never in your studies or job interviews will your methodology or tool usage skills be assessed, despite it being almost more important than raw programming skill.
PSO was the first MMO for consoles, working on 56k modem at the time. That was quite innovative. The console also had a few good jrpgs, as well as many good multiplayer games, of which equivalents didn't arrive on other consoles before the Nintendo Gamecube (which is similar to the Dreamcast on many aspects).
And of course, the Dreamcast is also still today the best console for shoot em ups, but that's very niche.
when Sony and Microsoft finally released their systems, the Dreamcast simply had no chance of standing in line against them from a technical perspective
Yet most multi-platform games were faster, snappier, and just felt plain better on the Dreamcast. In particular Quake 3, which was awesome on the Dreamcast, but downright unplayable on the PS2.
Version control is line-based, and yet many people use it to manage C++ source successfully, despite C++ grammar being much more complicated than XML, rendering your argument moot.
What a random guy says on a small website article hosted on some IEEE website is irrelevant and doesn't reflect the opinions of IEEE. You may want to look it up in a dictionary or encyclopaedia instead.
I believe the reason for the difference in our experience is because you're talking about undergraduate studies. Undergraduate studies don't mean much, and are often used as a mechanism to tell if people are smart enough to do science, but are not expected to actually do science as a job. It's mostly an evaluation criteria.
gifted is originally "given a gift". That implies that something, be it god, nature, or the laws of the cosmos, *gave* the person something to make him exceptional. Can't you see the religious or supernatural - or whatever superstitious make-believe humans have invented to cover up their lack of understanding of our world -- implications when they're right in front of you?
I am exploring the limits of my knowledge daily, I am an engineer, a bit of a scientist, but still not a computer scientist. Get your definitions straight.
It still is about state machines, compilers, programming languages, parallel algorithms. Having research papers with mathematical formulae and proofs is all nice and dandy, but at some point it's nice to actually implement the shit, test it out, studying the practicality of the thing etc., and that's software engineering.
I don't know anyone who did studies in math, physics or chemistry but who didn't end up doing teaching or research-like work in their respective fields (well there was a guy who studied physics who ended up doing bio-chemistry, but it was because they were interested in the effects of lasers on their stuff).
Then again I don't know anyone who studied those fields and stopped before getting a MSc.
I work in software development and I do a lot of open-source coding. It's frequent for changes to be integrated because they do not meet the standards of quality, the maintainer doesn't understand the changes and doesn't want to burden the extra complexity if he sees no need for it, the formatting is not correct, the patch contains too much unrelated crap that should need to be reviewed seperately and the maintainer doesn't want to spend time cleaning it, etc.
All of these are pretty normal, and I assume it's the same for wikipedia articles. If you want to make changes, you'll have to work on getting them integrated, which can be as much if not more work than the change itself.
Wikis still suck at collaborative work. The only good tool for collaborative work is a versioning system, preferably distributed. But most of the existing ones are designed for plain text in mind, not binaries or even computer-generated XML.
Slashdot Mirror
Smart people do not need to work at all to achieve A or better in high school.
No, he was a google employee, UK based
That reminds me a recent exchange I had with Google. Some guy from Google contacted me on linkedin saying Google was interested in my profile.
Since my profile is fairly atypical, I am a researcher, a technical consultant, a CEO of a tech start-up, an open-source enthusiast and member of several major standardization efforts, I was wondering what they had to offer.
I gave the guy my number and he called me. It was apparent that he hadn't even read my resume, and when I explained it he didn't seem to understand what I was saying. He actually expected me to resign from my job, freshen up bachelor's level computer science stuff and then come for an interview. He wouldn't even tell me how much they'd be able to pay me; just that "you know, Google has the best, and everyone there is quite satisfied with their salary".
If you're going to try hiring people randomly with keywords on linkedin, a good idea might be to check who you're pitching to.
You might not be the one to come back to it, but other people on the team will.
The most important ability of a developer is being able to work in a team. Since most real development happens on large codebases, this means that not only you need to have good tools to find your way in the code, but you also need to ensure your changes don't break anything, in particular other people's code, or if someone broke something for you you need to be able to figure out why. You need to work well with versioning tools, searching and indexing tools, debugging tools, bug reporting tools, reviewing tools, refactoring tools and testing tools.
Some of these tools you might have to write yourself specifically for a particular project.
Unfortunately, never in your studies or job interviews will your methodology or tool usage skills be assessed, despite it being almost more important than raw programming skill.
Same (and more, but I won't brag), and I'm only 25.
Those cartoony games are not only played by kids.
They're just games for all ages.
Nintendo just manages to make good games without resorting to big guns and baseless violence.
PSO was the first MMO for consoles, working on 56k modem at the time. That was quite innovative.
The console also had a few good jrpgs, as well as many good multiplayer games, of which equivalents didn't arrive on other consoles before the Nintendo Gamecube (which is similar to the Dreamcast on many aspects).
And of course, the Dreamcast is also still today the best console for shoot em ups, but that's very niche.
Yet most multi-platform games were faster, snappier, and just felt plain better on the Dreamcast. In particular Quake 3, which was awesome on the Dreamcast, but downright unplayable on the PS2.
Version control is line-based, and yet many people use it to manage C++ source successfully, despite C++ grammar being much more complicated than XML, rendering your argument moot.
What a random guy says on a small website article hosted on some IEEE website is irrelevant and doesn't reflect the opinions of IEEE. You may want to look it up in a dictionary or encyclopaedia instead.
I believe the reason for the difference in our experience is because you're talking about undergraduate studies.
Undergraduate studies don't mean much, and are often used as a mechanism to tell if people are smart enough to do science, but are not expected to actually do science as a job. It's mostly an evaluation criteria.
Engineering is science, dismissing your point entirely.
Plain text files with wikitext in ithem
Oh my god.
You're not even trolling are you?
gifted is originally "given a gift". That implies that something, be it god, nature, or the laws of the cosmos, *gave* the person something to make him exceptional. Can't you see the religious or supernatural - or whatever superstitious make-believe humans have invented to cover up their lack of understanding of our world -- implications when they're right in front of you?
I am exploring the limits of my knowledge daily, I am an engineer, a bit of a scientist, but still not a computer scientist.
Get your definitions straight.
Except engineering *is* science.
Don't confuse fundamental/applied with science/non-science.
You could have stopped there, that's accurate enough.
Computer scientists can't write code, and they really shouldn't. It's a waste of both their time and that of others.
It still is about state machines, compilers, programming languages, parallel algorithms. Having research papers with mathematical formulae and proofs is all nice and dandy, but at some point it's nice to actually implement the shit, test it out, studying the practicality of the thing etc., and that's software engineering.
I don't know anyone who did studies in math, physics or chemistry but who didn't end up doing teaching or research-like work in their respective fields (well there was a guy who studied physics who ended up doing bio-chemistry, but it was because they were interested in the effects of lasers on their stuff).
Then again I don't know anyone who studied those fields and stopped before getting a MSc.
Engineering is actually the science of applying fundamental science for practical applications.
So it's science too.
Using Ruby on Rails is not engineering, it's just development.
Looks like you're confusing TeX and LaTeX.
Only the latter claims to be semantic markup.
I work in software development and I do a lot of open-source coding. It's frequent for changes to be integrated because they do not meet the standards of quality, the maintainer doesn't understand the changes and doesn't want to burden the extra complexity if he sees no need for it, the formatting is not correct, the patch contains too much unrelated crap that should need to be reviewed seperately and the maintainer doesn't want to spend time cleaning it, etc.
All of these are pretty normal, and I assume it's the same for wikipedia articles. If you want to make changes, you'll have to work on getting them integrated, which can be as much if not more work than the change itself.
Better make it for a real language than for mediawiki which is just a bunch of hacks without specification though
Wikis still suck at collaborative work.
The only good tool for collaborative work is a versioning system, preferably distributed. But most of the existing ones are designed for plain text in mind, not binaries or even computer-generated XML.
The difference is in semantics.
If you don't understand what gifted means, I suggest you look up its etymology.