We hear a lot of wild claims from people calling themselves scientists. Unlike most of those, this is:
a peer-reviewed article appearing in a major (if not the major) scientific journal,
reporting an experimental result (not a business plan),
that we're hearing about because the article is going to press (not because it was planned or submitted; admittedly, we're hearing it a little early because of advance reports).
These are all good signs of good science. The better sign will be attempts to reproduce the experiment, with both successes and failures published in the same professional manner.
It's an extraordinary claim, and will require extraordinary evidence. Yes, this is just a first step; but at least it's in the right direction.
... ingesting graphic images of medical autopsies, brutalized bodies, blood-spattered sets and decomposing corpses
In my more cynical moments, I'm afraid that's exactly what appeals to a large percentage of the audience.
Too bad; it's a show that glorifies geeks ("You were never an athlete." "I'll have you know, in high school, I was captain of the chess squad.") and science, and often has good mysteries.
I'm still trying to figure why, so many Thursday nights, we end up eating dinner at home at 9 p.m., just as the first corpse appears.
My comment is there, but my name is misspelled (I'd like to know how they got an OCR-type error in what was sent as email).
Mine, too; my last name became "Chiselm" (a new mispelling, and I've seen plenty) in the index. It appears correctly in the text version
Looks as if they printed it, scanned it, and created a PDF file with a program from a company named "Pixel Translations," and (for the index) typed the name by hand.
These are the folks we're expected to believe have sufficient understanding of technical issues to rule correctly on this case? No; these are the folks who settled; it's the judge whose judgement we're relying on now.
Anyway, I'm glad my voice had an opportunity to be heard.
P.S.: My e-mail address does not appear, thank goodness (though that Yahoo! Mail address already gets about twenty spam messages a day).
Your employer probably has a policy on this. Find out what it is; follow it. This is even true if you're working for a different company than the one where you worked with the person in question.
If you don't have an employer, ask your lawyer.
(If you don't have a lawyer, and you live in New Jersey, I'll be happy to recommend mine. Verbally, of course.-)
Does this mean that Judge Kollar-Kotelly will rely on only these 47 to make her decision?
No, it means that posting the first 47 "major" (their word) comments is a significant step, and that they've taken it already. There are 15,000 "serious" (my word) anti-Microsoft comments (including mine), and 7,500 "serious" pro-Microsoft comments.
"Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly... said she planned to read the comments before deciding." I think that means all the comments; though she may "read" them by passing many to her clerks.
If I understand this correctly, the DOJ still intends to post all 47 + 15,000 + 7,500 comments on the Web, and publish them on CD, and index them in the dead tree Federal Register. (They're clever enough not to publish e-mail addresses, to the disappointment of spammers everywhere.)
There is no, no, no reason to expect this will happen. The SF Gate article's author, David Kipen, notes Ms. Rowling hasn't signed a contract, and asks, "What if?" It won't happen.
For the movable-type book, the killer app was the Bible. For television, the killer app was Milton Berle's "Texaco Star Theater," without which TV might still be duking it out with ham radio for market penetration.
Mr. Kipen suggests this would be a "killer"... for most neighborhood dead tree bookstores, more than one dead tree publisher, and any dead tree book e-tailer that doesn't lock in exclusive e-rights.
(For many breakthroughs, the killer app is either pr0n or some military application. The latter might work; some U.S. Navy ships carry literally a ton / tonne of paper documentation. I think we can rule out the former.-)
The most recent releases (15.3.1.7 and above) of all SNMP Research products address the vulnerabilities identified in the following CERT vulnerability advisories...
They've just announced 15.3. There's a version 15.2.1.7. Anyone know if that's what they really mean?
You don't want a powerful programming language unless you have a significant budget (say, $2000 US and 1-2 months per person) to train all the would-be developers. The biggest problem with C++ is how little of it most alleged "C++ programmers" really know about the language! Java may be no better. (Larry O'Brien: "Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than Everest.")
If I was picking a programming language from scratch, I would pick a very simple language, such as Python (which actually meets most of the boss's criteria) or Smalltalk.
Like most everyone else, I advise you to ask the boss what he really wants, or at least what's behind his wish list.
... the smart thing to do right now is to be searching for an IT job in a non-IT sector. Think banking, insurance, consultancy,...
People are doing that. Problem is, there are so many laid off techies (at least here in New Jersey), banks can afford to hire only people with banking experience, insurance companies can be picky and hire only people with insurance experience, etc.
Shortsighted? Dumb, even? Very possibly. Reality? So my out-of-work friends tell me.
How bad things are in New Jersey
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There are thousands of unemployed techies (product managers, project managers, testers, coders in every language you can name, and managers from line supervisors to vice president) who hit the market in less than a year.
You cannot, cannot, cannot get a tech job unless:
you get it through personal networking (before the job is "posted"), or
you have done the exact job before.
I know a software development project manager (a real techie with assember, C/C++, and VB coding experience behind him) who looked outside telecomm and applied for a job in the pharmaceutical sector. Forget it; there are so many unemployed techies out there, the employer was looking for a certain set of skills and experience in the sector... and could afford to wait for it.
I know another company that needed people to support a certain telecomm software system. They could afford to ignore everyone who could come up to speed on it, and hire only former developers of that system.
I'm still employed. If I'd been laid off last year (and I ducked two bullets by inches), I wasn't even going to look for a job; I was going to live off my wife's salary and write for a while.
You bet, though, if both my wife and I had been laid off, I'd be flipping burgers with the rest of them... or doing whatever it would take to support my family.
O'Reilly has made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend the use of lay-flat bindings as a cost-savings measure that today's economic climate deemed prudent. O'Reilly will resume providing this feature as soon as possible
I think they still print on acid-free paper (which makes the books last longer).
Answer: "... we generally don't operate the way many other publishers do in terms of just chasing hot topics with authors who are generically qualified to write on many topics. We look for authors who are already knowledgeable and passionate about a subject, who can look at our catalog and say, 'You need a book on such and such a subject' because they are convinced of the subject's importance and the lack of good information on the subject. If we're doing our job right, many of these subjects will already be covered with projects in the pipeline but not announced.... 'So You Want To Write a Book' has a fairly up-to-date list of the general topic areas we're interested in."
P.S.: Yes I want dead tree books, and often I need a shorter book more than a longer one. (Examples: UML Distilled and the XP series.)
Hilary Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said that the launch of commercial Internet subscription services was the most significant music business development of 2001.
... right after the efforts to swat down Napster and everything else.
... Johnson Hart, Win32 System Programming. It makes a lot of comparisons to the comparable Unix facilities for I/O, security, processes, threads, sockets, IPC, and dynamically loaded libraries.
It's old (1997; think Windows 95 and NT 3.51), and there's nothing about graphical user interfaces, or "modern" stuff such as COM. For what it covers, it's a great introduction, seemingly aimed at Unix programmers.
When the consumer clicks on the seal, they are connected to the Trusted Sender computer, which verifies the digital signature.
I'm sure no more people would have difficulty confusing real and forged seals than, say, have difficulty confusing whitehouse.gov with whitehouse.com, or knowing when it's safe to open an attachment in Outlook.-|
Hypothetically, I like the theory of a trusted opt-out list. What's the difference between theory and practice? In theory, nothing....
... what were / are government agencies' policies on advertising?
The United States Postal Service is not part of the United States government. It's (in effect) a private company, with a contract from the government to deliver mail.
The University of Illinois, where Mosaic (the first graphical Web browser) was developed, licensed the source code to Spyglass for commercial distribution.
Good news: Spyglass re-licensed it to a major corporation, so the university would get a percentage of all sales of that corporation's version.
Bad news: The corporation was Microsoft, the version was Internet Explorer, and it was distributed for free (as in beer). A percentage of $0 doesn't fill the coffers very well.
P.S.: The authors of Mosaic were annoyed by the university's policy, and wrote a new browser at a company named Mosaic Communications. The university claimed Mosaic was their trademark, so the company changed their name to Netscape.
I don't get why we're supposed to fly into a rage because Microsoft decides that paying attention to customers and giving them what they want for a better price is a good idea.
Because that's not what Mr. Valentine is calling for. He said:
... do the simple exercise of walking through you[r] accounts['] data centers and when you see a Sun or IBM machine, ask what it's used for, if you see some strange servers [and] you don't what they are doing -- ask what is running on them and take notes.
In other words, audit your customers' sites, and look for any tiny uses of Linux, just as a forest ranger would look for a spark in a dry woods, and for the same reason: so it can be stomped out immediately.
Is this taking advantage of a competitive position (how else would a salesperson be allowed to audit a customer's site?), which monopolies (such as Microsoft) aren't allowed to do? IANAL.
P.S.: The typos in the original are funny. Evidence for or against authenticity?
A CS degree (or any degree, for that matter) is not like a certification: it doesn't simply show mastery of one thing, but it demonstrates formal education in several areas, including critical thinking, math, communications (written and verbal), etc., with a specialization in one area (in your case, Comp Sci). You may be a stud programmer, but you will still have to take English, Math, some other basic requirements and some electives.
This is a good thing!
Engineering degrees, even at the undergraduate level, are years of little but engineering classes. CS undergraduate degrees are (and should be) liberal arts degrees. You're expected to be well rounded.
In all likelihood, you can get your firm to pay for you to get your degree at some local university. Why not take advantage of it and do it right instead of trying to find some way to rush through it?
If you have no college degree at all, then this advice won't help.
But...
If you have a bachelor's degree in anything, and your application looks decent (good enough undergraduate GPA and/or good real life experience), you might be able to get into a graduate program in computer science.
I was accepted by the University of Wisconsin at Madison's program with a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Math. My fellow graduate students had bachelor's degrees in English, teaching, French, all sorts of stuff. The department head's bachelor's degree was in philosophy. Later (at Bell Labs), I worked for a guy with an M.S. in CS, and a B.A. in French horn (music). All of us had programming experience as undergraduates, some classroom based, some not.
The UW CS program was tailored to this. There were a number of senior/graduate level classes; it was common to take a full semester of those, "catching up" on topics such as operating systems, compilers, and database management systems. (But we were expected to learn C from a couple of evening sessions, and our hands weren't held learning Unix, either.)
Forget the theory/practice dichotomy if you go to the right school. We learned a lot of theory. We also wrote many thousands of lines of C and Pascal code (back in the day when the Bell Labs "portable" C compiler was 5,000 lines long).
Two caveats:
This was back in 1979-1981. I expect CS graduate programs still take good candidates with bachelor's degrees in other subjects, but I can't guarantee it.
We worked hard. (I made a lot of 3 a.m. trips for donuts, and to the Coke machine in the student ACM lounge.) Don't think you can do this part time in a year!
IBM is, for some ungodly reason, stuck on manufacturing the UGLIEST desktop computers that the world has ever seen!!... one must remember that the average consumer is more interested in something that looks good.
Several companies tried to make "pretty" Wintel boxes. Neither the companies nor the boxes are around any more. It would appear The Market decided not to pay extra for non-ugly Wintel computers.
(Steve Jobs doesn't give consumers the choice between ugly and pretty Macs. I don't know for sure how many people bought pretty Macs because they were pretty, and how many because they were Macs; very few and almost all, I'd guess.)
Just under the wire, I've manage to post the first early alpha version (0.1) of "Thinking in Python."
Please note:
1) This is not an introductory book. I couldn't bring myself to write yet another introductory language tutorial, and there are already plenty of good ones out there. This is "Design Patterns in Python," so I can use any language features or advanced techniques that I want, without apology (hooray!).
2) This is an early translation of "Thinking in Patterns," so parts of it have not yet been translated. I've tried to mark those chapters, but please be patient.
The source code is in the download package. When you unzip everything (remember to use the -a flag with unzip if you're on Unix), the code will be put into subdirectories for each chapter.
In addition, this book debuts my new 'BackTalk' comment collection system that I built in Zope.
Slashdot Mirror
- a peer-reviewed article appearing in a major (if not the major) scientific journal,
- reporting an experimental result (not a business plan),
- that we're hearing about because the article is going to press (not because it was planned or submitted; admittedly, we're hearing it a little early because of advance reports).
These are all good signs of good science. The better sign will be attempts to reproduce the experiment, with both successes and failures published in the same professional manner.It's an extraordinary claim, and will require extraordinary evidence. Yes, this is just a first step; but at least it's in the right direction.
Too bad; it's a show that glorifies geeks ("You were never an athlete." "I'll have you know, in high school, I was captain of the chess squad.") and science, and often has good mysteries.
I'm still trying to figure why, so many Thursday nights, we end up eating dinner at home at 9 p.m., just as the first corpse appears.
Looks as if they printed it, scanned it, and created a PDF file with a program from a company named "Pixel Translations," and (for the index) typed the name by hand.
These are the folks we're expected to believe have sufficient understanding of technical issues to rule correctly on this case? No; these are the folks who settled; it's the judge whose judgement we're relying on now.
Anyway, I'm glad my voice had an opportunity to be heard.
P.S.: My e-mail address does not appear, thank goodness (though that Yahoo! Mail address already gets about twenty spam messages a day).
Your employer probably has a policy on this. Find out what it is; follow it. This is even true if you're working for a different company than the one where you worked with the person in question.
If you don't have an employer, ask your lawyer.
(If you don't have a lawyer, and you live in New Jersey, I'll be happy to recommend mine. Verbally, of course.-)
"Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly
If I understand this correctly, the DOJ still intends to post all 47 + 15,000 + 7,500 comments on the Web, and publish them on CD, and index them in the dead tree Federal Register. (They're clever enough not to publish e-mail addresses, to the disappointment of spammers everywhere.)
(For many breakthroughs, the killer app is either pr0n or some military application. The latter might work; some U.S. Navy ships carry literally a ton / tonne of paper documentation. I think we can rule out the former.-)
Did I mention it won't happen?
You don't want a powerful programming language unless you have a significant budget (say, $2000 US and 1-2 months per person) to train all the would-be developers. The biggest problem with C++ is how little of it most alleged "C++ programmers" really know about the language! Java may be no better. (Larry O'Brien: "Claiming Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is shorter than Everest.")
If I was picking a programming language from scratch, I would pick a very simple language, such as Python (which actually meets most of the boss's criteria) or Smalltalk.
Like most everyone else, I advise you to ask the boss what he really wants, or at least what's behind his wish list.
Shortsighted? Dumb, even? Very possibly. Reality? So my out-of-work friends tell me.
You cannot, cannot, cannot get a tech job unless:
- you get it through personal networking (before the job is "posted"), or
- you have done the exact job before.
I know a software development project manager (a real techie with assember, C/C++, and VB coding experience behind him) who looked outside telecomm and applied for a job in the pharmaceutical sector. Forget it; there are so many unemployed techies out there, the employer was looking for a certain set of skills and experience in the sectorI know another company that needed people to support a certain telecomm software system. They could afford to ignore everyone who could come up to speed on it, and hire only former developers of that system.
I'm still employed. If I'd been laid off last year (and I ducked two bullets by inches), I wasn't even going to look for a job; I was going to live off my wife's salary and write for a while.
You bet, though, if both my wife and I had been laid off, I'd be flipping burgers with the rest of them
Umbrellas are good. I've had both.
http://letters.oreilly.com/newdesign_0102.html
Also:
http://letters.oreilly.com/repkover_0901.html
I think they still print on acid-free paper (which makes the books last longer).
http://www.oreilly.com/ask_tim/booktopics_0102.htm l
... we generally don't operate the way many other publishers do in terms of just chasing hot topics with authors who are generically qualified to write on many topics. We look for authors who are already knowledgeable and passionate about a subject, who can look at our catalog and say, 'You need a book on such and such a subject' because they are convinced of the subject's importance and the lack of good information on the subject. If we're doing our job right, many of these subjects will already be covered with projects in the pipeline but not announced.... 'So You Want To Write a Book' has a fairly up-to-date list of the general topic areas we're interested in."
Question: What book topics are in demand?
Answer: "
P.S.: Yes I want dead tree books, and often I need a shorter book more than a longer one. (Examples: UML Distilled and the XP series.)
The Free Software movement says, "Use the software that's the most free. If you still have a choice, use the best software."
The Open Source Software movement says, "Use the best software. That will often be Free / Open Source software."
... Johnson Hart, Win32 System Programming. It makes a lot of comparisons to the comparable Unix facilities for I/O, security, processes, threads, sockets, IPC, and dynamically loaded libraries.
It's old (1997; think Windows 95 and NT 3.51), and there's nothing about graphical user interfaces, or "modern" stuff such as COM. For what it covers, it's a great introduction, seemingly aimed at Unix programmers.
Hypothetically, I like the theory of a trusted opt-out list. What's the difference between theory and practice? In theory, nothing....
The University of Illinois, where Mosaic (the first graphical Web browser) was developed, licensed the source code to Spyglass for commercial distribution.
Good news: Spyglass re-licensed it to a major corporation, so the university would get a percentage of all sales of that corporation's version.
Bad news: The corporation was Microsoft, the version was Internet Explorer, and it was distributed for free (as in beer). A percentage of $0 doesn't fill the coffers very well.
P.S.: The authors of Mosaic were annoyed by the university's policy, and wrote a new browser at a company named Mosaic Communications. The university claimed Mosaic was their trademark, so the company changed their name to Netscape.
Is this taking advantage of a competitive position (how else would a salesperson be allowed to audit a customer's site?), which monopolies (such as Microsoft) aren't allowed to do? IANAL.
P.S.: The typos in the original are funny. Evidence for or against authenticity?
Engineering degrees, even at the undergraduate level, are years of little but engineering classes. CS undergraduate degrees are (and should be) liberal arts degrees. You're expected to be well rounded.Excellent advice.
An associate's degree is a good start, and a good intermediate goal. It's better than nothing!
If you have no college degree at all, then this advice won't help.
...
But
If you have a bachelor's degree in anything, and your application looks decent (good enough undergraduate GPA and/or good real life experience), you might be able to get into a graduate program in computer science.
I was accepted by the University of Wisconsin at Madison's program with a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Math. My fellow graduate students had bachelor's degrees in English, teaching, French, all sorts of stuff. The department head's bachelor's degree was in philosophy. Later (at Bell Labs), I worked for a guy with an M.S. in CS, and a B.A. in French horn (music). All of us had programming experience as undergraduates, some classroom based, some not.
The UW CS program was tailored to this. There were a number of senior/graduate level classes; it was common to take a full semester of those, "catching up" on topics such as operating systems, compilers, and database management systems. (But we were expected to learn C from a couple of evening sessions, and our hands weren't held learning Unix, either.)
Forget the theory/practice dichotomy if you go to the right school. We learned a lot of theory. We also wrote many thousands of lines of C and Pascal code (back in the day when the Bell Labs "portable" C compiler was 5,000 lines long).
Two caveats:
This was back in 1979-1981. I expect CS graduate programs still take good candidates with bachelor's degrees in other subjects, but I can't guarantee it.
We worked hard. (I made a lot of 3 a.m. trips for donuts, and to the Coke machine in the student ACM lounge.) Don't think you can do this part time in a year!
(Steve Jobs doesn't give consumers the choice between ugly and pretty Macs. I don't know for sure how many people bought pretty Macs because they were pretty, and how many because they were Macs; very few and almost all, I'd guess.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=mailman