And do you have proof they don't use their product and aren't satisfied with it???
And what makes anyone think other companies aren't doing this??
I read both the good reviews and the bad ones, and pay no attention to the 'stars' since most people are morons and couldn't properly rate a software package to begin with. I look for patterns in the good and bad reviews to point to areas where there might be issues. If one person whines about usability, it can probably be ignored. If 20 do, then maybe there is a usability problem.
In other words, think for yourself and do your own research instead of being lead around by someone who appears to know what they are talking about. I got through 4 years of high school because I knew how to BS an essay test. Didn't mean I knew what I was talking about.
You are correct, it is intended to be a reference to Jim Jones and his sheep. I didn't even know that Kool-aid had any reference to blacks. I guess both of us learned something.
I guess I had better change that to make a better point, I don't mind offending Obama supporters.
The students are free to refuse... and go to the dean and others if pressed.
The freedom of speech comes with a heavy price. I'm not referring to the price men and women paid to achieve it. I'm talking about the price paid having to listen to asshats like that teacher spouting their nonsense.
I just walk past it, push the power button, and pick up the remote on the way to the couch. All I need is on and off....there is nothing on TV so important I can't wait a few seconds for it to cycle on.
My thoughts exactly. My wife and I go on motorcycle trips and we never take a laptop or surf the internet while we are gone. I do carry a cell phone if someone has to get hold of me.
It amazes me the addiction people have to the internet, myself included. The first thing I do when I get home from work is check my personal email (I work for a company that doesn't allow personal email at work for SEC reasons). Yet 99% of the time it's something that could wait for a couple more hours.
My friends will send me emails, and if I don't get back to them in a couple of hours, will call me to see if I got their email. Which was just a simple question that if I took a couple of days to answer wouldn't have been a big deal.
Drop off the face of the earth while at sea. When you get back, you will have tons of stories to tell about your adventure. Do it in person over beer or coffee. Repeat the same stories over and over again until you are sick of telling them.
Save your internet time for making sure your bills are getting paid.
Maybe it's the nature of the caller. My cell phone calls are almost all under 2 minutes. I have the numbers I call most on speed dial, so it's two buttons to unlock the phone, and one to call.
So for me, calling is more convenient than texting. And, since I don't pay for extended texting and never go over my minutes calling, cheaper. But that's just me, I also don't make a lot of phone calls just to chat. I prefer to talk with my friends when I see them.
No one is forcing anyone to text, people choose to do it. While the supply may be high and plentiful, the demand is great and drives the price up no matter what the supply is because people are willing to pay for it and the 'convenience' they feel it brings them.
And that is the truly dirty secret no one is discussing. Even sunlight can be sold if people are stupid enough to pay for it.
I hate to break it to you... but police get paid for writing tickets. And Ford sells police cars, so they are also getting paid for writing tickets. The better their cars so the cops can catch more criminals, the more they get paid.
Find another excuse to justify breaking the law please. Speeding is speeding, people who were caught speeding and given tickets, whether a policeman has given it out or an automated camera, get no sympathy in my book. Stop being a cry baby, admit you were speeding, and pay the ticket like a responsible adult instead of a kid caught by his parents.
Oh.. my wife got a speeding ticket for going 11 over the speed limit. We paid the fine.
I too have almost been rear ended. Not at a camera intersection, but at a regular intersection because the guy behind me felt he could follow me through the intersection. Did I mention I was on a motorcycle also and he was driving a truck?? So it seems the risk of getting rear ended at a yellow light has always been there, so please provide a statistic that shows that risk has gotten significantly higher without a reduced number of serious injuries caused by people running red lights.
Yeah.. it's a perversion to give people who are breaking the law speeding tickets. Terrible thing to gain revenue from people who are violating the law and causing accidents, traffic congestion and road rage. It's an awful thing that speed cameras are installed near entrance and exit ramps in an attempt to slow down traffic and reduce accident rates.
What should we think of a government that tries to find new ways to make our highways safe. It's much better to things the old way, just hire more police officers and put them to work. Who cares that a police car on the highway causes congestion, and slows traffic to it's knees when it pulls someone over. Or that a police officer might get struck by a passing car or shot by the person he pulls over. Or that a police car pulling out into high speed traffic from a standstill also increases traffic accident risks.
Better to just let people drive any speed they want whenever they want, cutting in and out of traffic without any concern for the disturbances they leave in their wake.
Funny thing, if most everyone would stop speeding, the revenue stream would dry up to the point the cameras become more expensive to operate than they are worth and they would just come down on their own. Wouldn't that be a terrible thing, for our highways to be free from people who think they know how fast they can drive safely, irregardless of their training or experience.
For pure CPU driven applications, I would agree with this statement. But NONE of the business applications I write are bogged down by CPUs. They are bogged down by I/O, either user uploads/downloads, network, or disk access.
I have yet to see any application that was fixed for good by throwing hardware at it. Sooner or later, the piper has to be paid and the problem fixed. Someone improved response time by putting in a new server?? Does that mean they had web/app/database/data all on one machine?? Bad, bad, BAD design for large applications, no where to grow. At least if it's tiered and using a SAN with optical channels more servers can be added. Sometimes, more, not faster is better. And resources can be shared to make optimal use out of the servers that are available.
The FIRST step is to determine WHY something is slow. Is it memory, cpu, or I/O bound. That doesn't take a rocket scientist, looking at sar in Unix or Task Mangager in Windows can show you that. Sure, if it's CPU bound, buying faster CPUs will fix it.
The comment about developers having good boxes isn't the same as for applications. My latest job gives every developer a top-notch box with two monitors, I was in heaven. Unfortunately, it can't stop there. I also need development servers with disk space and memory to test large data sets BEFORE they go into production.
Setting expectations is the best way to manage over optimization. Don't say "I need a program to do this", state "I need a program to do this work in this time frame". It is silly to make a daily batch program that takes 2 minutes run 25% faster. But it's not silly to make a web page respond in under 2 secs., or a 4 hour batch job to run in 3 *if* it is needed. But without the expectation, there is no starting or stopping point. Most developers will state "it's done" when the right answer comes out the other end, while a few may continue to tune it until it's dead.
I wonder if you look at any discipline, be it one that is more education based, such as lawyers, doctors, engineers or more labor based, such as plumbers, carpenters, and electricians, you will hear the same complaints.
But, statistically, only half of the people doing something are above average. And only 10% are the best. No matter what the group is, there are those that probably shouldn't have gotten into it, but have figured out how to skate by.
So, before we even start, probably at least 1/3 will never measure up because they are so far below average compared to everyone else. It doesn't matter what the education is, is 50% or more can write a piece of code and debug it in 5 days, 50% can't and will be looked down on. And that does for quality, bugs, and whatever other metric is out there.
Ignoring that insurmountable problem programming requires very specific abilities, anyone can be a code monkey and write code. But, to think through the myriad of possible outcomes to determine an effective solution (i.e. should I make it run faster or use less memory, how much error checking should I do, what auditing messages should I output) requires someone who can make decisions and has a high degree of spatial awareness. These are not skills that are easily taught to begin with, yet I have yet to see any degree program create a means to weed out those that can't do it.
Then there is the problem solving skills, does anyone even teach that? How do teach how to figure out why the program aborted at 3am and isolate it to the root cause? Where to start, and how to proceed in isolating what is broken and what is working in a system where the root cause may be a program that ran a week ago and corrupted data?
Rather than waste more money teach people who may have no real talent for doing this in the first place, I suggest we start filtering out those that will never be all that good at it, no matter how much schooling they get. Having a degree only tells me that someone was able to figure out what the teacher wanted and knew how to feed it back. I want the kid who was hacking into the computer system at night getting higher security clearance so his jobs ran faster. The kid who got his work done in half the time of the other students and was off playing WOW until 3am so he got bad grades because he screwed up on the the final exam.
And, let's not forget. Bjarne is an EXPERIENCED professional, he is NOT a CS major that has never seen the inside of a cubicle.
Maybe the real solution is make it a requirement that to be able to teach CS, you have to work for 20 years in the real world, so you can fully appreciate when it is and isn't appropriate to use those magic constants. Or how you can code/prototype with the constants for rapid development, and then how to go back and refactor them out later.
I don't even check whether or not someone has attended college when I look at a resume. However, HR insists on putting down 'college BS required'.
I would argue that not going to college shows how smart someone is by getting into the work force 4 years early and not spending big bucks. My salary has consistently been at or above the average for whatever part of IT I was working in. I took courses based on what my employer needed my skills to be, not on what some college thought I needed, and used tuition reimbursement to cover several of them. The studies that show 'college degrees mean X% more in pay' are bogus, they may show correlation, but they don't show cause. Since people who are smarter and more motivated tend to go to college, of course they make more money later in life. It doesn't mean college had anything to do with it.
Smart, motivated people don't need degrees. Average people need degrees to suggest they might be smarter than they really are.
HOWEVER.... if someone has the means to attend college, I would never advise against it. I just wouldn't advise someone to go into large scale debt to do it. Live at home or attend part time. Put on your resume 'Attending college and working towards a BS in whatever'.
Unfortunately, the god mentality leads to many bad things. Children are traumatized because they feel their friends are going to burn in hell. Adults spend an untold amount of time and money trying to convince others that their god is the right one (ignoring the other tens of thousands out there.) This ID garbage is foisted upon the ignorant without the means to truly respond, I doubt if any religious parent would allow the 'there is no god' theory to be talked about in school to debate ID even while they want to use ID to debunk evolution.
Yes, our ignorant and savage ancestors created religion to control the masses and sooth them.
Is that an acceptable reason to keep the ignorant sheep ignorant?? The world's population had to deal with the earth not being flat and we managed to survive the transition. Unfortunately, those deceived by the religious leaders are easily fooled by new fairy tales.
The best place to start is by teaching the children, and that means either keeping ID out of our schools, or allowing truly critical discussions to occur including the prospect that there are no gods.
There is no reason to prove it since it adds nothing to the universe. Nothing currently existing in the universe needs ID to explain why it exists, except in the instances where the explanation still isn't understood. And giving an explanation of ID as the solution in those cases stops critical thinking in it's tracks. If anything, ID interferes with the search for knowledge, and that is a very bad thing.
ID is a circular argument with no end and no rationality. And no necessity. I've seen rock formations that look like someone created them, because the human mind is very good at making faces out of random patterns. But the argument, "I can't explain it, therefore a god did it" is one of the lamest arguments I have ever heard.
Maybe the reason some things can't be explained yet is because the human race is just too ignorant. But there are ego's that just won't accept that. Those that claim ID love to spout 'we know the answer' when it seems like just another fairy tale with no proof beyond a few books written by humans.
If anything, atheists are very humble about their place in the universe. We understand that in this unimaginably large universe, the human race is on an insignificant spec of dirt in some insignificant galaxy. We don't claim that some all powerful, all knowing entity created all of this, yet cares about each and every one of us.
An open source project that requires purchasing (or pirating) a closed source product to use. That is, you have to have a PC version of GTA: San Andreas to use it.
My wife and I have two point and shoot cameras, a Nikon and an Olympus. We also have a Pentax dSLR.
Looking at the images at 100% scale and you can see a tremendous difference in the amount of noise in the backgrounds. That is mostly caused by the smaller size of the CCDs and the quality of the sensor itself. Plus, the higher end cameras have far better noise reduction software built in.
Depth of field is EVERYTHING to taking pictures. By using a long lens and a large aperture, bars around zoo cages disappear, the annoying crowd behind the bride also disappears, or that person just standing behind your subject gets just the faintest blur so your eye is drawn to the subject. Or use a small aperture and everything is brought into crisp focus.
Then there is being able to use higher quality optics. I recently used the Pentax camera to take some campfire scenes using a 50mm(film) lens set at 1.4f. I was able to take clear, handheld images around the campfire. Try that with a point and shoot.
I'm not knock the PS cameras. I use them when I'm riding my motorcycle to get action shots of those I ride with. That would be impossible with a dSLR or SLR camera, they are just too big and bulky.
But if someone wants to take high quality snapshots to share, nothing beats a dSLR. Pricey, yes. But well worth it for the serious photographer, be they professional or hobbyist.
I don't buy DRM music (at least if I know beforehand), I don't buy anything but dishes from Wal*Mart (long story), I don't buy Apple products because of their attempt to control everything, I don't upgrade to every Windows version, and I use Linux whenever it makes sense. I don't use software that I think is crap. And I don't have a problem with some corporation making big bucks off of some software they wrote.
But that's just me. I don't feel the need to force anyone else to conform to my causes. And feel quite nauseated that some people believe they are the only ones that know what the 'right kinds of software' is.
Whether or not it is short sighted is a matter of opinion.
Maybe people should stop drooling over every little thing the experts claim and make their own decisions using their own thoughts. Read what someone says, then make a decision about whether it is an opinion piece or they have some facts that are useful.
I realize his opinion was an 'I'm not sure' opinion rather than what the OP stated, but still. I use Firefox, it's free, and it does what I want. The other conditions he puts on it are irrelevant to me. If it stops being free (as in beer, not freedom) or doesn't do what I want, I'll go elsewhere.
Thank you. One of the first statistical mistakes made when 'proving' this universe had a creator is showing the statistical probability that we exist on this specific planet instead of the probability life existing somewhere in a universe of an unknown size and age.
I just bought a Palm Centro and use it to read. MobiPocket has many free books that I have downloaded, those classics we all dreaded in high school somehow become more tolerable when we don't have to write book reports on them. I've also paid for a couple of electronic books. They have software for Blackberrys, Windows Mobile and Symbian also. Oddly, no software for iPhones. There are also other products like eReader that do work on the iPhone. But that's not my point.
It's really nice having my library in my pocket. I was at the dentist last week. As they were waiting for the x-rays, I pulled my phone out, and read a few pages. Plus I don't have to scrounge around for out-of-date magazines anymore in the waiting room. If I get tired of reading, there are always games.
It's not something I would use to sit and read for hours at a time, but it's fine for airplane, toilet, and doctor office reading. I suppose the iPhone with it's larger screen would be a little bit better, but I only spent $50 for a refurbished model, and it's good enough.
So, what you are saying, is Obama never promised anything, just made it seem like he did. He made an empty promise that couldn't be fulfilled to make it sound good, then turned around and made a mockery of the very campaign finance reform he was purporting himself to be a champion of. He said unless McCain could stop organizations that were legally allowed to participate in the campaign process, then he wouldn't do it. Wow... that is some skilled oration there. Not a role model I want my kids to follow though, someone with two sides to their mouth.
It is very doubtful that a politician running for president will ever use public funds again. There is no benefit to it anymore, all thanks to Obama's narrow victory and ability to flood the airwaves with unanswered infomercials. He has personally set campaign finance reform back decades.
I can't wait until he gets to work on the economy and makes the rich send all of their income overseas and increases taxes on small business that can barely stay afloat now. I know of one construction business that passes the $250,000 question and is barely keeping their heads above water now. I wonder how many more are out there that will be broken by 'spreading the wealth'.
Thanks for the info on First Data... time to go see what snakes crawl out from under that rock.
Ummm...funny thing... jobs don't require degrees. Stupid HR people and pointy haired managers do.
Just because a job application says 'BA required', doesn't mean a BA is required. PhD.. yes. I'll grant that some jobs require a doctorate degree. Like a doctor. But you don't even need a college degree to become a lawyer, why should one be required to be an entry level programmer or operator. All someone needs to do is to put some pride aside at start AT THE BOTTOM LIKE THE REST OF US. Take that job in a call center, and find out how to use the tuition reimbursement program to become an accountant, salesman, manager, sys admin, or a host of other jobs available at most companies.
Petsmart was what is known as an example. My daughter is now going to school to become an RN because a local hospital WILL PAY FOR IT in exchange for her working there for 5 years. My ex-wife went to night school for two years to become an RN and makes over 60K/year working 4 days a week. I've used tuition reimbursement programs to take night courses to advance myself at jobs. Been sent off to sys admin and dba classes for free. There are many opportunities to get an education by spending little or no money.
Still think a degree is what is needed?? There are plenty of community and state colleges that can pass out sheep skins for minimal amounts, it's just a piece of paper that no one really cares where it came from anyway so why spend big bucks buying it.
I suggest you check out this Washington Post document in which he said he would strengthen the system and also agreed to do it if his opponent did. Which McCain did.
Besides, an agreement to work out public financing?? What agreement, either you do or you don't. There was nothing to 'work out'. Just do it. Did he think public financing is good for everyone, or just for everyone else? Is this what we have to look forward to for the next 4 years as he rules??
Just today I was reading how McCain's campaign is going to have to spend millions because accepting public financing means an automatic audit. Meanwhile. Obama is unlikely to undergo any scrutiny because of the millions in anonymous, sub-$200 donations and the unlikelihood they would audit a sitting president.
His failure to live with public financing has now killed that option. No candidate in the future will ever agree to it. The benefits of not accepting public financing have now been forever proven.
Obama was just another politician buying an election. And since we can't even verify the funds, since they refuse to release the information, we can't even say if it truly was a grass roots effort.
When you get smart enough to be able to negotiate a better wage than other other stiffs doing the same work, then you get a higher salary. If 10,000 people can empty trash cans, then the pay is low. If 5 people can provide a specific skill, they get paid more. That doesn't make emptying trash cans any less important, but it does mean that with a larger pool, the wages will be lower. Now, find someone who can empty trash cans twice as fast, and they just might find they can command a higher wage than the rest.
Is that taking advantage? Sure. But then, if I sold a car on Craig's List and someone offered me more money than I thought it was worth, should I turn it down??? If someone offered me more money to work at a job than I thought I could contribute, should I say no?? Funny how that argument about taking advantage only works in one direction. (And yes, I have had jobs where I felt I was overpaid based on the contribution I was making. And no, I didn't ask for a cut in pay.)
The government has an obligation to set basic health and safety regulations, I would even go so far that a low minimum wage and a low minimum health care plan would also be acceptable. But don't whine about 'being taken advantage of'. Everyone is taken advantage of. The question is, how much are you willing to be taken advantage of, and what can you do about it?? It's the nature of competition to try to get more value for something than you need to spend.
Slashdot Mirror
And do you have proof they don't use their product and aren't satisfied with it???
....
And what makes anyone think other companies aren't doing this??
I read both the good reviews and the bad ones, and pay no attention to the 'stars' since most people are morons and couldn't properly rate a software package to begin with. I look for patterns in the good and bad reviews to point to areas where there might be issues. If one person whines about usability, it can probably be ignored. If 20 do, then maybe there is a usability problem.
In other words, think for yourself and do your own research instead of being lead around by someone who appears to know what they are talking about. I got through 4 years of high school because I knew how to BS an essay test. Didn't mean I knew what I was talking about.
Or that I do now
You are correct, it is intended to be a reference to Jim Jones and his sheep. I didn't even know that Kool-aid had any reference to blacks. I guess both of us learned something.
I guess I had better change that to make a better point, I don't mind offending Obama supporters.
The teacher is free to ask ...
... and go to the dean and others if pressed.
The students are free to refuse
The freedom of speech comes with a heavy price. I'm not referring to the price men and women paid to achieve it. I'm talking about the price paid having to listen to asshats like that teacher spouting their nonsense.
And having the freedom to ignore it.
Can I remove the GUI and use a pure shell??? It's the largest amount of bloat and totally unnecessary for a file server.
Thought not....
I just walk past it, push the power button, and pick up the remote on the way to the couch. All I need is on and off....there is nothing on TV so important I can't wait a few seconds for it to cycle on.
My thoughts exactly. My wife and I go on motorcycle trips and we never take a laptop or surf the internet while we are gone. I do carry a cell phone if someone has to get hold of me.
It amazes me the addiction people have to the internet, myself included. The first thing I do when I get home from work is check my personal email (I work for a company that doesn't allow personal email at work for SEC reasons). Yet 99% of the time it's something that could wait for a couple more hours.
My friends will send me emails, and if I don't get back to them in a couple of hours, will call me to see if I got their email. Which was just a simple question that if I took a couple of days to answer wouldn't have been a big deal.
Drop off the face of the earth while at sea. When you get back, you will have tons of stories to tell about your adventure. Do it in person over beer or coffee. Repeat the same stories over and over again until you are sick of telling them.
Save your internet time for making sure your bills are getting paid.
Maybe it's the nature of the caller. My cell phone calls are almost all under 2 minutes. I have the numbers I call most on speed dial, so it's two buttons to unlock the phone, and one to call.
So for me, calling is more convenient than texting. And, since I don't pay for extended texting and never go over my minutes calling, cheaper. But that's just me, I also don't make a lot of phone calls just to chat. I prefer to talk with my friends when I see them.
No one is forcing anyone to text, people choose to do it. While the supply may be high and plentiful, the demand is great and drives the price up no matter what the supply is because people are willing to pay for it and the 'convenience' they feel it brings them.
And that is the truly dirty secret no one is discussing. Even sunlight can be sold if people are stupid enough to pay for it.
So and compiler do it for you, performance results are not consistent between runs.
... what a shock....
Wow
What's next. A study that shows if you don't select any optimization parameters a program won't run as effective as selecting the best ones??
I hate to break it to you ... but police get paid for writing tickets. And Ford sells police cars, so they are also getting paid for writing tickets. The better their cars so the cops can catch more criminals, the more they get paid.
.. my wife got a speeding ticket for going 11 over the speed limit. We paid the fine.
Find another excuse to justify breaking the law please. Speeding is speeding, people who were caught speeding and given tickets, whether a policeman has given it out or an automated camera, get no sympathy in my book. Stop being a cry baby, admit you were speeding, and pay the ticket like a responsible adult instead of a kid caught by his parents.
Oh
I too have almost been rear ended. Not at a camera intersection, but at a regular intersection because the guy behind me felt he could follow me through the intersection. Did I mention I was on a motorcycle also and he was driving a truck?? So it seems the risk of getting rear ended at a yellow light has always been there, so please provide a statistic that shows that risk has gotten significantly higher without a reduced number of serious injuries caused by people running red lights.
Yeah .. it's a perversion to give people who are breaking the law speeding tickets. Terrible thing to gain revenue from people who are violating the law and causing accidents, traffic congestion and road rage. It's an awful thing that speed cameras are installed near entrance and exit ramps in an attempt to slow down traffic and reduce accident rates.
What should we think of a government that tries to find new ways to make our highways safe. It's much better to things the old way, just hire more police officers and put them to work. Who cares that a police car on the highway causes congestion, and slows traffic to it's knees when it pulls someone over. Or that a police officer might get struck by a passing car or shot by the person he pulls over. Or that a police car pulling out into high speed traffic from a standstill also increases traffic accident risks.
Better to just let people drive any speed they want whenever they want, cutting in and out of traffic without any concern for the disturbances they leave in their wake.
Funny thing, if most everyone would stop speeding, the revenue stream would dry up to the point the cameras become more expensive to operate than they are worth and they would just come down on their own. Wouldn't that be a terrible thing, for our highways to be free from people who think they know how fast they can drive safely, irregardless of their training or experience.
For pure CPU driven applications, I would agree with this statement. But NONE of the business applications I write are bogged down by CPUs. They are bogged down by I/O, either user uploads/downloads, network, or disk access.
I have yet to see any application that was fixed for good by throwing hardware at it. Sooner or later, the piper has to be paid and the problem fixed. Someone improved response time by putting in a new server?? Does that mean they had web/app/database/data all on one machine?? Bad, bad, BAD design for large applications, no where to grow. At least if it's tiered and using a SAN with optical channels more servers can be added. Sometimes, more, not faster is better. And resources can be shared to make optimal use out of the servers that are available.
The FIRST step is to determine WHY something is slow. Is it memory, cpu, or I/O bound. That doesn't take a rocket scientist, looking at sar in Unix or Task Mangager in Windows can show you that. Sure, if it's CPU bound, buying faster CPUs will fix it.
The comment about developers having good boxes isn't the same as for applications. My latest job gives every developer a top-notch box with two monitors, I was in heaven. Unfortunately, it can't stop there. I also need development servers with disk space and memory to test large data sets BEFORE they go into production.
Setting expectations is the best way to manage over optimization. Don't say "I need a program to do this", state "I need a program to do this work in this time frame". It is silly to make a daily batch program that takes 2 minutes run 25% faster. But it's not silly to make a web page respond in under 2 secs., or a 4 hour batch job to run in 3 *if* it is needed. But without the expectation, there is no starting or stopping point. Most developers will state "it's done" when the right answer comes out the other end, while a few may continue to tune it until it's dead.
I wonder if you look at any discipline, be it one that is more education based, such as lawyers, doctors, engineers or more labor based, such as plumbers, carpenters, and electricians, you will hear the same complaints.
But, statistically, only half of the people doing something are above average. And only 10% are the best. No matter what the group is, there are those that probably shouldn't have gotten into it, but have figured out how to skate by.
So, before we even start, probably at least 1/3 will never measure up because they are so far below average compared to everyone else. It doesn't matter what the education is, is 50% or more can write a piece of code and debug it in 5 days, 50% can't and will be looked down on. And that does for quality, bugs, and whatever other metric is out there.
Ignoring that insurmountable problem programming requires very specific abilities, anyone can be a code monkey and write code. But, to think through the myriad of possible outcomes to determine an effective solution (i.e. should I make it run faster or use less memory, how much error checking should I do, what auditing messages should I output) requires someone who can make decisions and has a high degree of spatial awareness. These are not skills that are easily taught to begin with, yet I have yet to see any degree program create a means to weed out those that can't do it.
Then there is the problem solving skills, does anyone even teach that? How do teach how to figure out why the program aborted at 3am and isolate it to the root cause? Where to start, and how to proceed in isolating what is broken and what is working in a system where the root cause may be a program that ran a week ago and corrupted data?
Rather than waste more money teach people who may have no real talent for doing this in the first place, I suggest we start filtering out those that will never be all that good at it, no matter how much schooling they get. Having a degree only tells me that someone was able to figure out what the teacher wanted and knew how to feed it back. I want the kid who was hacking into the computer system at night getting higher security clearance so his jobs ran faster. The kid who got his work done in half the time of the other students and was off playing WOW until 3am so he got bad grades because he screwed up on the the final exam.
And, let's not forget. Bjarne is an EXPERIENCED professional, he is NOT a CS major that has never seen the inside of a cubicle.
Maybe the real solution is make it a requirement that to be able to teach CS, you have to work for 20 years in the real world, so you can fully appreciate when it is and isn't appropriate to use those magic constants. Or how you can code/prototype with the constants for rapid development, and then how to go back and refactor them out later.
I don't even check whether or not someone has attended college when I look at a resume. However, HR insists on putting down 'college BS required'.
.... if someone has the means to attend college, I would never advise against it. I just wouldn't advise someone to go into large scale debt to do it. Live at home or attend part time. Put on your resume 'Attending college and working towards a BS in whatever'.
I would argue that not going to college shows how smart someone is by getting into the work force 4 years early and not spending big bucks. My salary has consistently been at or above the average for whatever part of IT I was working in. I took courses based on what my employer needed my skills to be, not on what some college thought I needed, and used tuition reimbursement to cover several of them. The studies that show 'college degrees mean X% more in pay' are bogus, they may show correlation, but they don't show cause. Since people who are smarter and more motivated tend to go to college, of course they make more money later in life. It doesn't mean college had anything to do with it.
Smart, motivated people don't need degrees. Average people need degrees to suggest they might be smarter than they really are.
HOWEVER
Unfortunately, the god mentality leads to many bad things. Children are traumatized because they feel their friends are going to burn in hell. Adults spend an untold amount of time and money trying to convince others that their god is the right one (ignoring the other tens of thousands out there.) This ID garbage is foisted upon the ignorant without the means to truly respond, I doubt if any religious parent would allow the 'there is no god' theory to be talked about in school to debate ID even while they want to use ID to debunk evolution.
Yes, our ignorant and savage ancestors created religion to control the masses and sooth them.
Is that an acceptable reason to keep the ignorant sheep ignorant?? The world's population had to deal with the earth not being flat and we managed to survive the transition. Unfortunately, those deceived by the religious leaders are easily fooled by new fairy tales.
The best place to start is by teaching the children, and that means either keeping ID out of our schools, or allowing truly critical discussions to occur including the prospect that there are no gods.
There is no reason to prove it since it adds nothing to the universe. Nothing currently existing in the universe needs ID to explain why it exists, except in the instances where the explanation still isn't understood. And giving an explanation of ID as the solution in those cases stops critical thinking in it's tracks. If anything, ID interferes with the search for knowledge, and that is a very bad thing.
ID is a circular argument with no end and no rationality. And no necessity. I've seen rock formations that look like someone created them, because the human mind is very good at making faces out of random patterns. But the argument, "I can't explain it, therefore a god did it" is one of the lamest arguments I have ever heard.
Maybe the reason some things can't be explained yet is because the human race is just too ignorant. But there are ego's that just won't accept that. Those that claim ID love to spout 'we know the answer' when it seems like just another fairy tale with no proof beyond a few books written by humans.
If anything, atheists are very humble about their place in the universe. We understand that in this unimaginably large universe, the human race is on an insignificant spec of dirt in some insignificant galaxy. We don't claim that some all powerful, all knowing entity created all of this, yet cares about each and every one of us.
Now THAT takes an ego.
An open source project that requires purchasing (or pirating) a closed source product to use. That is, you have to have a PC version of GTA: San Andreas to use it.
I think I'll pass on this one.
My wife and I have two point and shoot cameras, a Nikon and an Olympus. We also have a Pentax dSLR.
Looking at the images at 100% scale and you can see a tremendous difference in the amount of noise in the backgrounds. That is mostly caused by the smaller size of the CCDs and the quality of the sensor itself. Plus, the higher end cameras have far better noise reduction software built in.
Depth of field is EVERYTHING to taking pictures. By using a long lens and a large aperture, bars around zoo cages disappear, the annoying crowd behind the bride also disappears, or that person just standing behind your subject gets just the faintest blur so your eye is drawn to the subject. Or use a small aperture and everything is brought into crisp focus.
Then there is being able to use higher quality optics. I recently used the Pentax camera to take some campfire scenes using a 50mm(film) lens set at 1.4f. I was able to take clear, handheld images around the campfire. Try that with a point and shoot.
I'm not knock the PS cameras. I use them when I'm riding my motorcycle to get action shots of those I ride with. That would be impossible with a dSLR or SLR camera, they are just too big and bulky.
But if someone wants to take high quality snapshots to share, nothing beats a dSLR. Pricey, yes. But well worth it for the serious photographer, be they professional or hobbyist.
I don't buy DRM music (at least if I know beforehand), I don't buy anything but dishes from Wal*Mart (long story), I don't buy Apple products because of their attempt to control everything, I don't upgrade to every Windows version, and I use Linux whenever it makes sense. I don't use software that I think is crap. And I don't have a problem with some corporation making big bucks off of some software they wrote.
But that's just me. I don't feel the need to force anyone else to conform to my causes. And feel quite nauseated that some people believe they are the only ones that know what the 'right kinds of software' is.
Whether or not it is short sighted is a matter of opinion.
Maybe people should stop drooling over every little thing the experts claim and make their own decisions using their own thoughts. Read what someone says, then make a decision about whether it is an opinion piece or they have some facts that are useful.
I realize his opinion was an 'I'm not sure' opinion rather than what the OP stated, but still. I use Firefox, it's free, and it does what I want. The other conditions he puts on it are irrelevant to me. If it stops being free (as in beer, not freedom) or doesn't do what I want, I'll go elsewhere.
Thank you. One of the first statistical mistakes made when 'proving' this universe had a creator is showing the statistical probability that we exist on this specific planet instead of the probability life existing somewhere in a universe of an unknown size and age.
I just bought a Palm Centro and use it to read. MobiPocket has many free books that I have downloaded, those classics we all dreaded in high school somehow become more tolerable when we don't have to write book reports on them. I've also paid for a couple of electronic books. They have software for Blackberrys, Windows Mobile and Symbian also. Oddly, no software for iPhones. There are also other products like eReader that do work on the iPhone. But that's not my point.
It's really nice having my library in my pocket. I was at the dentist last week. As they were waiting for the x-rays, I pulled my phone out, and read a few pages. Plus I don't have to scrounge around for out-of-date magazines anymore in the waiting room. If I get tired of reading, there are always games.
It's not something I would use to sit and read for hours at a time, but it's fine for airplane, toilet, and doctor office reading. I suppose the iPhone with it's larger screen would be a little bit better, but I only spent $50 for a refurbished model, and it's good enough.
So, what you are saying, is Obama never promised anything, just made it seem like he did. He made an empty promise that couldn't be fulfilled to make it sound good, then turned around and made a mockery of the very campaign finance reform he was purporting himself to be a champion of. He said unless McCain could stop organizations that were legally allowed to participate in the campaign process, then he wouldn't do it. Wow ... that is some skilled oration there. Not a role model I want my kids to follow though, someone with two sides to their mouth.
... time to go see what snakes crawl out from under that rock.
It is very doubtful that a politician running for president will ever use public funds again. There is no benefit to it anymore, all thanks to Obama's narrow victory and ability to flood the airwaves with unanswered infomercials. He has personally set campaign finance reform back decades.
I can't wait until he gets to work on the economy and makes the rich send all of their income overseas and increases taxes on small business that can barely stay afloat now. I know of one construction business that passes the $250,000 question and is barely keeping their heads above water now. I wonder how many more are out there that will be broken by 'spreading the wealth'.
Thanks for the info on First Data
Ummm...funny thing ... jobs don't require degrees. Stupid HR people and pointy haired managers do.
.. yes. I'll grant that some jobs require a doctorate degree. Like a doctor. But you don't even need a college degree to become a lawyer, why should one be required to be an entry level programmer or operator. All someone needs to do is to put some pride aside at start AT THE BOTTOM LIKE THE REST OF US. Take that job in a call center, and find out how to use the tuition reimbursement program to become an accountant, salesman, manager, sys admin, or a host of other jobs available at most companies.
Just because a job application says 'BA required', doesn't mean a BA is required. PhD
Petsmart was what is known as an example. My daughter is now going to school to become an RN because a local hospital WILL PAY FOR IT in exchange for her working there for 5 years. My ex-wife went to night school for two years to become an RN and makes over 60K/year working 4 days a week. I've used tuition reimbursement programs to take night courses to advance myself at jobs. Been sent off to sys admin and dba classes for free. There are many opportunities to get an education by spending little or no money.
Still think a degree is what is needed?? There are plenty of community and state colleges that can pass out sheep skins for minimal amounts, it's just a piece of paper that no one really cares where it came from anyway so why spend big bucks buying it.
I suggest you check out this Washington Post document in which he said he would strengthen the system and also agreed to do it if his opponent did. Which McCain did.
Besides, an agreement to work out public financing?? What agreement, either you do or you don't. There was nothing to 'work out'. Just do it. Did he think public financing is good for everyone, or just for everyone else? Is this what we have to look forward to for the next 4 years as he rules??
Just today I was reading how McCain's campaign is going to have to spend millions because accepting public financing means an automatic audit. Meanwhile. Obama is unlikely to undergo any scrutiny because of the millions in anonymous, sub-$200 donations and the unlikelihood they would audit a sitting president.
His failure to live with public financing has now killed that option. No candidate in the future will ever agree to it. The benefits of not accepting public financing have now been forever proven.
Obama was just another politician buying an election. And since we can't even verify the funds, since they refuse to release the information, we can't even say if it truly was a grass roots effort.
When you get smart enough to be able to negotiate a better wage than other other stiffs doing the same work, then you get a higher salary. If 10,000 people can empty trash cans, then the pay is low. If 5 people can provide a specific skill, they get paid more. That doesn't make emptying trash cans any less important, but it does mean that with a larger pool, the wages will be lower. Now, find someone who can empty trash cans twice as fast, and they just might find they can command a higher wage than the rest.
... communism.
Is that taking advantage? Sure. But then, if I sold a car on Craig's List and someone offered me more money than I thought it was worth, should I turn it down??? If someone offered me more money to work at a job than I thought I could contribute, should I say no?? Funny how that argument about taking advantage only works in one direction. (And yes, I have had jobs where I felt I was overpaid based on the contribution I was making. And no, I didn't ask for a cut in pay.)
The government has an obligation to set basic health and safety regulations, I would even go so far that a low minimum wage and a low minimum health care plan would also be acceptable. But don't whine about 'being taken advantage of'. Everyone is taken advantage of. The question is, how much are you willing to be taken advantage of, and what can you do about it?? It's the nature of competition to try to get more value for something than you need to spend.
Anything else is