Programming can be a highly developed craft, but it cannot be art.
Now that is not true, just as many Fashion Designers design cloths that have no practical value outside of being "showcased", I as a programmer can write a program that has no practical purpose outside of showing others a particularly nifty bit of code.
My local school treats comp sci as a subset of math, so to get the BS, you have to do ungodly amounts of math that will likely never see real world use.
The purpose of that math is not to "be put to real world use", but rather to train your mind in a variety of thinking styles, that will allow you to wrap yourself around any problem that comes at you, find solutions using the proper tool set.
Some types of problems are best represented in an iterative looping structure, whilst others are best represented as matrix transformations. The question is, can you tell which are which?
As always, UK:Resistance says it best - Sorry love, women are shit at Tekken. Why I hate Wimmin in Gaming comes a close second too.
Mine ain't, she loves fighting games (Soul Caliber actually), thinks RPGs and Puzzle games are too boring, liked GTA3 until she saw it was sucking up too much of her time and stopped playing it (she never got past the first intro to it, she just kept hopping in the first car she could find and running people over).
describing sound is a little like describing color
Not really, colors are very accuratly defined by wavelength, mixtures of colors in print are accuratly defined by their dithering pattern (or how ever the color was created), and when doing proffesional level work, even variations caused by different brands of monitors is accounted for.
This all is worth squat to the average person though, who cannot really tell if his or her monitor is not properly color calibrated, nor do they care.
Likewise for sound, unless something has been compressed so much that it sounds like it is under water, no one much cares.
In any case, the name isn't catching on; it's persistently misinterpreted. Time to call it "open source" and tell the FSF to EAD.
The problem is that English is rather limited in this respect, we only have two words for this, Free and Freedom, and Freedom, and "Freedom Software" sounds like something released by the DHS.
From what I understand at the GNU homepage, other languages have more than one word for this concept, so they have less of a problem.
Free Software (as RMS believes) is something that is way too radical for most businessmen. I'm sure that Schwartz was just trying to interact with his audience on their level.
Actually it is quite simple to explain to anyone in IT:
If there is some stupid simple bug in the code that is impeeding productivity, if the code is Free as in Freedome, you have the right to have your programmers modify and fix the bug in a matter of DAYS.
If the software is prioporitary, then you have to BEG the vendor to fix it, and wait for either a patch, or possibly an entire new version, before the bug gets fixed.
Geographic Information System. A computer software system with which spatial information (eg. maps) can be captured, stored, analyzed, displayed and retrieved.
A few years ago, I'm sure plenty of people told the Google guys that they were a few years too late for making a search engine.
AOL's problem is the Internet-for-beginners stigma that's attached to their name. My bet is the better move would be to dump their millions into a new brand, push their current user base towards it, and hope the non-AOL users will underestimate the connection.
If AOL pulls this off it could benefit them greatly, lots of people are willing to pay for actuall usefull services on the web. $10 a month for a web service with the power of GMail, easy file transfer with lots of storage space, a RSS feed, good stock information, high quality multimedia entertainment?
or when Professor Isaac Asimov(PHd in physics) described the evolution of a super-mutant with tremendous psychic power, who came to dominate the (faster than light hyperspace capable) galactic empire in the 1950's classic Foundation and Empire.
Excellent sociological study though.:) Which is what most Science Fiction amounts to.
Compare this to Asimov's edited "Before the Golden Age" and you can really see some of the Hard Science Fiction themes in action.
(Anybody else remember that story about a planet with almost no friction? It might have ben in BTGA, but maybe not. Anyways, excellent example of a Hard Science Fiction story!)
In a lot of modern day science fiction, the science element is nothing more than a thin veneer placed over what is really a work of sociological investigation into modern society.
Now I am not saying that this is bad, Science Fiction is afterall a rather liberal genre, and this has been quite useful at times, (Aliens, Robots, etc, serving as standings for oppressed racial groups, allowing us to view situations in a more objective light and take what we have learned back to the real world), but sometimes I want something where I can actually sit down, read a book, and be entertained and learn something at the same time!
A lot of the older science fiction authors were excellent at this. I find that the current (current being the last 40 or so years) group of science fiction authors tend to disregard science completely, only rehashing what they have read in other science fiction stories.
Hard-Science Fiction is about taking one little fact of science, twisting it a bit, and seeing how that would effect the rest of our scientific knowledge, and in the process gaining a further understanding about how science in the real world works.
This is why I rarely read the newer Science Fiction authors (newer meaning after the 1960s!), I prefer the older authors who actually had Doctorates of Science!
(or, in many cases, were on their way towards getting a doctorate in science and writing Science Fiction is how they paid for, in part, their education!)
Often times you can learn a lot about real world science from these authors (albiet some what dated now, as many areas of science have long since surpassed the knowledge possessed when these stories were originally written), something that I find lacking in modern day science fiction.
Not just that, but 13-26 year olds who have *proven* that they'd rather steal stuff than buy it... but surely they'll want to pay for *your* product, right? Idiots.
Depends, even teenagers put a marginal value on their next "unit" of time trying to get some pirated piece of software to work, or the latest Video Codec to decompress the latest Hollywood flick.
Owning a legitimate copy of a product makes live much easier.
Even on Windows programs often install straight onto c:\ by default (the nerve!), and sometimes within Program Files they're within subfolders related to the vendor, which can sometimes be non-obvious.
Anything that installs right on into C:\ is getting booted, programs should not even be USING absolute path names.
Things like %SYSTEM_ROOT% (or whatever it is) are much appreciated!
And in fact the vast majority (well over 90%) of Windows programs behave properly! This is mostly do to the popularity of the Nullsoft installer, which is either dirt cheap or free (I forget which), and which has no problems installing a program even if your program files directory is on a different drive letter aside from C!
As for the vender subfolder thing, yah, that is irritating, but at least I can break the search task up into smaller directories, rather than having one just monolithic list of executable files.
It sounds like you would have spent much less time just adding an entry to your WM's app menu,
You know what? I'd love to, but Linux Window Managers are stuck in the Windows 95 era when it comes to menu editing.
Seriously, RIGHT-CLICK-CONTEXT-MENUS PEOPLE.
Having to either run a separate application, or even worse, edit a text file, is just stupid. Why should I have to leave the base interface to accomplish such a simple task.
Oddly enough, Microsoft got this one right, their entire start menu is stored as a directory hierarchy, and as such is dirt easy to rearrange from explorer itself. (Just drag and drop shortcuts where ever you want them at!)
I don't even know exactly where it is stored at, I just right click on it and hit explore. So, freaking, obvious.
Gnome and KDE both have many usability enhancements over Windows (KDE, a gazillion and one customizations are available, Gnome, everything fits together nicely), but the App Menu is still one place that both lag so far behind in it is not even funny.
> 2. The locations of programs are user-unfriendly.
If a Unix app program is properly set up. THE LOCATION IS ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT to the user.
Braindead viewpoint. Hundreds of applications are installed on my system, not all of them get put in my WM's app menu, so I drop to console to start them.
IF I can remember what the program I want to run is called!
Under Windows I can root around the/Program Files/ directory for a bit until I find what I want, under Linux, I have something like 3 or 4 Bin directories, each with literally hundreds of executables in it.
Often times it is easier to Google around for some verbs that describe what I want to do and try typing in different program names that come up as a result.
Like the P2P program, Valknut. Do you know how hard it is to remember that name? For the first week I had that program I had to Google for "Linux DC client" every time I wanted to remember what it was called!
And then there's Windows. Which is just terrible in every regard. It rips off ideas from every other system and re-presents them in sloppy, half-realized, buggy style. It is even more bondage-and-discipline than Mac, having a single-minded drive to force you to do it the Windows-way ONLY, and punishes you harshly for deviating from the path.
From a development perspective, maybe so (depending on what exactly you are trying to do), but from a UI point of view, not really.
The entire UI is pluggable, Explorer is the default graphical shell, feel free to replace it with anything you wish. (Including a CLI if that is your desire)
Even for developers, Windows 2000+ offers quite a bit of flexibility, I have seen program that allowed mounting of a site that a user had SCP access to as a local hard drive, very nice, very flexible.
Or am I wrong and is there a quick and easy way to build a native "plug-'n-pray" driver base such as Windows XP has? Love it or hate it, you have to admit that XP really does have great native support for tons of stuff, a feature which is a huge plus for a lot of people. Usually, it really does Just Work (TM)
This actually is not TOO huge of a problem.
Since Apple switched over to PCI and AGP ports quite some time ago, there already exists a large hardware base designed around those two industry standards.
Next, since the actual OSX kernel compiles against both the PowerPC and x86 platforms, any kernel calls in the drivers will not have to be rewritten.
Indeed depending on how Apple handles their BIOS calls, very little may need to be rewritten at all. Many hardware devices now days are CPU assisted, (sound cards, network cards, modems, and so on) which may help Apple a great deal as the heart of these types of devices drivers essentially boils down to Kernel calls and a basic software app, both of which should port over easily.
Basically anything that already has an OSX driver on the PowerPC platform should, with not too much work, and often times maybe with no work at all, have an equivilent driver on an OSX release on x86.
A dream goal for Apple of course would be drivers needing no porting at all, since it is very unlikely that venders will put even the slightest effort in porting over drivers for older hardware. Heck even in the world of Windows, hardware support often times falls to the wayside after only 3 or 4 years! (In other words a lot of hardware that was released for 98, ME, and Windows 2000 ended up without Windows XP support! Ouch!)
Wow, I was thinking of KDE as being a GREAT example of what is WRONG with OSS!
I mean think about it, to run, lets say, a MP3 PLAYER, you also end up loading about 15-30 megabytes of additional libraries.
And if KDE is more streamlined with every release, why does KDE 2.x require a 64 meg system, and KDE 3.x requires at least a 256 meg system! (though honestly I run KDE with 256 megs and it SUCKS, horribly!)
The kicker is, the default theme for 2.x and 3.x look almost identical, albiet 3.3+ have a kicking themes engine which allow KDE to look REALLY damn good and incure little if any performance hit. (the flip side of this is, you can not really "disable" themes in KDE, you always incure the performance hit!)
If a new KPart or KIOslave is created for 1 app, it can be used by all apps. This is how you open a text file from a remote system in the Kate editor by pointing the Open dialog to
This is just common sense, users have been TRYING to do this for years, it has just taken developers forever to catch up!
Windows kinda-sorta-maybe does this at times, it really should do it MORE often, mostly it is programmer mindlessness that keeps Windows from kicking much more ass UI wise.
BTW: When did/. get the new "verify you are not a script" thing? How odd, I do not remember it a few days ago.
most of the questions we ask are problem solving questions. and not of the lame-assed variety of "why are manhole covers round". Ultimately I don't care if a candidate knows the details of STL, but if they lack general CS knowledge - which is what we are really looking for - that is a clear sign. Common mistakes that can hurt you:
Well it would be nice for starters if Amazon.com responded to resume submissions! Are your HR people screening things out first or what? I know a number of talented programmers who have applied for internships and submitted their resume to what seems to be a blackhole of a website!
Honestly, if you want some good candidates, come to a college career fair, do on campus interviews the same, or next, day. Screen us out in real time, at any given career fair you have a very limited applicant pool, so it is possible to actually speak with all possible applicants on a given day, and you generally only have to worry about people who honestly want the job coming and applying.
I am sitting here at Western Washington University and hour and a half north of amazon.com (I am figuring that I guessed your company right correct?) and at the last two career fairs I have not seen Amazon.com represented (though to be fair the school did have to turn away a number of applicants at this latest career fair due to such an overwhelming response from companies looking for new employees, so maybe Amazon.com just could not get in?).
The same goes for on campus interviews for internships, you want to hurry up and weed through people, announce you are doing on campus interviews, send a representative up here, and have students schedule an appointment in advance. Honestly you can figure out if a person knows what they should know in a very short period of time when it is an actual programmer talking to another programmer (rather than HR talking to a programmer, far too many of us students are learning that we have to be 100% buzzwords compliant just to get our resumes through the HR filter!), and by hiring interns early on in their college career (with a year or two left before graduation) you could not only get students who would pay attention to the curriculum as you desired them to when they went back to school, but also the possibility for two summers of training opens up, and by the time the person graduated they would be an actual somewhat experienced developer.
Heck, a lot of us are willing to go for 3 month, 6 month, or how ever long the company wants, internships. For crying out loud, we want to learn, there is no reason that companies can't go out and tell us what we need to be paying attention to. I know that in the past Western has even hired Industry programmers to come in and teach their Java series, just so students would have an idea of what concepts they are expected to know when they graduate.
As for the cost of internship recruiting, surely if the cost of an H1B visa employee is so high, then the cost of sending one or two recruiters to local universities once or twice a year would be much less.
I certainly do agree that it is important to have internship positions, for just this reasons. (I did in fact have one last year, but admitadely have been negligent in looking for someone this year.)
Now you see, this is why you should just go out and hire someone like me, who you know you can trust to get the job done.:)
Seriously though, (actually I am serious up above!), a lot of companies only hire IT through internship programs. Weyerhaeuser is one of them, if you look at their careers site, zero listings for IT, but they have a large IT department, it is just that they are 100% (or nearly so) recruited from their past college interns.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that is not true, just as many Fashion Designers design cloths that have no practical value outside of being "showcased", I as a programmer can write a program that has no practical purpose outside of showing others a particularly nifty bit of code.
The purpose of that math is not to "be put to real world use", but rather to train your mind in a variety of thinking styles, that will allow you to wrap yourself around any problem that comes at you, find solutions using the proper tool set.
Some types of problems are best represented in an iterative looping structure, whilst others are best represented as matrix transformations. The question is, can you tell which are which?
Mine ain't, she loves fighting games (Soul Caliber actually), thinks RPGs and Puzzle games are too boring, liked GTA3 until she saw it was sucking up too much of her time and stopped playing it (she never got past the first intro to it, she just kept hopping in the first car she could find and running people over).
Not really, colors are very accuratly defined by wavelength, mixtures of colors in print are accuratly defined by their dithering pattern (or how ever the color was created), and when doing proffesional level work, even variations caused by different brands of monitors is accounted for.
This all is worth squat to the average person though, who cannot really tell if his or her monitor is not properly color calibrated, nor do they care.
Likewise for sound, unless something has been compressed so much that it sounds like it is under water, no one much cares.
The problem is that English is rather limited in this respect, we only have two words for this, Free and Freedom, and Freedom, and "Freedom Software" sounds like something released by the DHS.
From what I understand at the GNU homepage, other languages have more than one word for this concept, so they have less of a problem.
Actually it is quite simple to explain to anyone in IT:
If there is some stupid simple bug in the code that is impeeding productivity, if the code is Free as in Freedome, you have the right to have your programmers modify and fix the bug in a matter of DAYS.
If the software is prioporitary, then you have to BEG the vendor to fix it, and wait for either a patch, or possibly an entire new version, before the bug gets fixed.
Anything Motorola.
USB ports, spiffy. You need some proprietary Windows only software to do it though.
What ever happened to having a neighborhood welcoming party? Or just going over to their house to say hi?
www.orafaq.com/glossary/faqglosg.htm
AOL's problem is the Internet-for-beginners stigma that's attached to their name. My bet is the better move would be to dump their millions into a new brand, push their current user base towards it, and hope the non-AOL users will underestimate the connection.
If AOL pulls this off it could benefit them greatly, lots of people are willing to pay for actuall usefull services on the web. $10 a month for a web service with the power of GMail, easy file transfer with lots of storage space, a RSS feed, good stock information, high quality multimedia entertainment?
If programmed well, it would sell.
Excellent sociological study though.
Compare this to Asimov's edited "Before the Golden Age" and you can really see some of the Hard Science Fiction themes in action.
(Anybody else remember that story about a planet with almost no friction? It might have ben in BTGA, but maybe not. Anyways, excellent example of a Hard Science Fiction story!)
In a lot of modern day science fiction, the science element is nothing more than a thin veneer placed over what is really a work of sociological investigation into modern society.
Now I am not saying that this is bad, Science Fiction is afterall a rather liberal genre, and this has been quite useful at times, (Aliens, Robots, etc, serving as standings for oppressed racial groups, allowing us to view situations in a more objective light and take what we have learned back to the real world), but sometimes I want something where I can actually sit down, read a book, and be entertained and learn something at the same time!
A lot of the older science fiction authors were excellent at this. I find that the current (current being the last 40 or so years) group of science fiction authors tend to disregard science completely, only rehashing what they have read in other science fiction stories.
Hard-Science Fiction is about taking one little fact of science, twisting it a bit, and seeing how that would effect the rest of our scientific knowledge, and in the process gaining a further understanding about how science in the real world works.
This is why I rarely read the newer Science Fiction authors (newer meaning after the 1960s!), I prefer the older authors who actually had Doctorates of Science!
(or, in many cases, were on their way towards getting a doctorate in science and writing Science Fiction is how they paid for, in part, their education!)
Often times you can learn a lot about real world science from these authors (albiet some what dated now, as many areas of science have long since surpassed the knowledge possessed when these stories were originally written), something that I find lacking in modern day science fiction.
Depends, even teenagers put a marginal value on their next "unit" of time trying to get some pirated piece of software to work, or the latest Video Codec to decompress the latest Hollywood flick.
Owning a legitimate copy of a product makes live much easier.
$300, $350 maybe if I want some extra goodies.
The thing is, OEMs put cheap components in their systems, if I drop $500 on a system I make myself, I KNOW it is going to last.
Of course the all steel ball bearing fans I have are also louder than crud, but darnit, they will last!
*thinking of going with magnetic tip propulsion next time*
Anything that installs right on into C:\ is getting booted, programs should not even be USING absolute path names.
Things like %SYSTEM_ROOT% (or whatever it is) are much appreciated!
And in fact the vast majority (well over 90%) of Windows programs behave properly! This is mostly do to the popularity of the Nullsoft installer, which is either dirt cheap or free (I forget which), and which has no problems installing a program even if your program files directory is on a different drive letter aside from C!
As for the vender subfolder thing, yah, that is irritating, but at least I can break the search task up into smaller directories, rather than having one just monolithic list of executable files.
You know what? I'd love to, but Linux Window Managers are stuck in the Windows 95 era when it comes to menu editing.
Seriously, RIGHT-CLICK-CONTEXT-MENUS PEOPLE.
Having to either run a separate application, or even worse, edit a text file, is just stupid. Why should I have to leave the base interface to accomplish such a simple task.
Oddly enough, Microsoft got this one right, their entire start menu is stored as a directory hierarchy, and as such is dirt easy to rearrange from explorer itself. (Just drag and drop shortcuts where ever you want them at!)
I don't even know exactly where it is stored at, I just right click on it and hit explore. So, freaking, obvious.
Gnome and KDE both have many usability enhancements over Windows (KDE, a gazillion and one customizations are available, Gnome, everything fits together nicely), but the App Menu is still one place that both lag so far behind in it is not even funny.
If a Unix app program is properly set up. THE LOCATION IS ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT to the user.
Braindead viewpoint. Hundreds of applications are installed on my system, not all of them get put in my WM's app menu, so I drop to console to start them.
IF I can remember what the program I want to run is called!
Under Windows I can root around the
Often times it is easier to Google around for some verbs that describe what I want to do and try typing in different program names that come up as a result.
Like the P2P program, Valknut. Do you know how hard it is to remember that name? For the first week I had that program I had to Google for "Linux DC client" every time I wanted to remember what it was called!
From a development perspective, maybe so (depending on what exactly you are trying to do), but from a UI point of view, not really.
The entire UI is pluggable, Explorer is the default graphical shell, feel free to replace it with anything you wish. (Including a CLI if that is your desire)
Even for developers, Windows 2000+ offers quite a bit of flexibility, I have seen program that allowed mounting of a site that a user had SCP access to as a local hard drive, very nice, very flexible.
This actually is not TOO huge of a problem.
Since Apple switched over to PCI and AGP ports quite some time ago, there already exists a large hardware base designed around those two industry standards.
Next, since the actual OSX kernel compiles against both the PowerPC and x86 platforms, any kernel calls in the drivers will not have to be rewritten.
Indeed depending on how Apple handles their BIOS calls, very little may need to be rewritten at all. Many hardware devices now days are CPU assisted, (sound cards, network cards, modems, and so on) which may help Apple a great deal as the heart of these types of devices drivers essentially boils down to Kernel calls and a basic software app, both of which should port over easily.
Basically anything that already has an OSX driver on the PowerPC platform should, with not too much work, and often times maybe with no work at all, have an equivilent driver on an OSX release on x86.
A dream goal for Apple of course would be drivers needing no porting at all, since it is very unlikely that venders will put even the slightest effort in porting over drivers for older hardware. Heck even in the world of Windows, hardware support often times falls to the wayside after only 3 or 4 years! (In other words a lot of hardware that was released for 98, ME, and Windows 2000 ended up without Windows XP support! Ouch!)
Another problem is that Optical Mice have a horrible resolution, well under 100x100, I think it might even be less than 50x50.
It could take a LOT of scans to get a barcode in correctly, since any little bit of wiggle would upset things.
I mean think about it, to run, lets say, a MP3 PLAYER, you also end up loading about 15-30 megabytes of additional libraries.
And if KDE is more streamlined with every release, why does KDE 2.x require a 64 meg system, and KDE 3.x requires at least a 256 meg system! (though honestly I run KDE with 256 megs and it SUCKS, horribly!)
The kicker is, the default theme for 2.x and 3.x look almost identical, albiet 3.3+ have a kicking themes engine which allow KDE to look REALLY damn good and incure little if any performance hit. (the flip side of this is, you can not really "disable" themes in KDE, you always incure the performance hit!)
This is just common sense, users have been TRYING to do this for years, it has just taken developers forever to catch up!
Windows kinda-sorta-maybe does this at times, it really should do it MORE often, mostly it is programmer mindlessness that keeps Windows from kicking much more ass UI wise.
BTW: When did
They linked to Stanford.
/. Stanford. This is not Podunk U!
Who would imagine that we could
Oh well, I guess the Graphics department at Stanford isn't recieving any love from their IT department.
That is the same thing we said to England a few years ago about us having better privacy rights.
Well it would be nice for starters if Amazon.com responded to resume submissions! Are your HR people screening things out first or what? I know a number of talented programmers who have applied for internships and submitted their resume to what seems to be a blackhole of a website!
Honestly, if you want some good candidates, come to a college career fair, do on campus interviews the same, or next, day. Screen us out in real time, at any given career fair you have a very limited applicant pool, so it is possible to actually speak with all possible applicants on a given day, and you generally only have to worry about people who honestly want the job coming and applying.
I am sitting here at Western Washington University and hour and a half north of amazon.com (I am figuring that I guessed your company right correct?) and at the last two career fairs I have not seen Amazon.com represented (though to be fair the school did have to turn away a number of applicants at this latest career fair due to such an overwhelming response from companies looking for new employees, so maybe Amazon.com just could not get in?).
The same goes for on campus interviews for internships, you want to hurry up and weed through people, announce you are doing on campus interviews, send a representative up here, and have students schedule an appointment in advance. Honestly you can figure out if a person knows what they should know in a very short period of time when it is an actual programmer talking to another programmer (rather than HR talking to a programmer, far too many of us students are learning that we have to be 100% buzzwords compliant just to get our resumes through the HR filter!), and by hiring interns early on in their college career (with a year or two left before graduation) you could not only get students who would pay attention to the curriculum as you desired them to when they went back to school, but also the possibility for two summers of training opens up, and by the time the person graduated they would be an actual somewhat experienced developer.
Heck, a lot of us are willing to go for 3 month, 6 month, or how ever long the company wants, internships. For crying out loud, we want to learn, there is no reason that companies can't go out and tell us what we need to be paying attention to. I know that in the past Western has even hired Industry programmers to come in and teach their Java series, just so students would have an idea of what concepts they are expected to know when they graduate.
As for the cost of internship recruiting, surely if the cost of an H1B visa employee is so high, then the cost of sending one or two recruiters to local universities once or twice a year would be much less.
Now you see, this is why you should just go out and hire someone like me, who you know you can trust to get the job done.
Seriously though, (actually I am serious up above!), a lot of companies only hire IT through internship programs. Weyerhaeuser is one of them, if you look at their careers site, zero listings for IT, but they have a large IT department, it is just that they are 100% (or nearly so) recruited from their past college interns.