with that in mind, it might be good to by PC speakers with line-in! Then people can bring ipods all they want... but they'll never touch the work machines.
Why not let them use their own headphones? They probably sound better than $20 speakers. Also, they can turn the volume up louder. Unless all your employees have offices?
Maintenance programming in general is an excellent place to start. There is no better way to appreciate and learn about good and bad architecture, good and bad code, and to develop understanding of those attributes which influence maintainability. It allows you to focus on how to build without the interference of what to build.
Well sometimes maintenance programing will teach you to become a good architect. However, some people won't become good architects ever. They simply lack the ability to design on a large scale. However, these people often make good career maintenance programmers. They can follow any pattern and modify software without falling into the temptation to "improve" it in ways that break it.
Thats not to say that I am against using the position of maintenance programmer for junior programmers. Its a good place to learn, and one should be able to step through an existing code base, find the cause of an issue and resolve it, before being allowed to create their own systems.
In the "hard" engineering disciplines, their tends to be a progression from "inspector" positions, to making minor design changes, to designing systems. This is beginning to take place in software design. However, we have yet to formulate the general industry wide career paths that one finds in the civil, mechanical and electrical fields.
As the WalMart VP says: "The labels price things based on what they believe they can get -- a pricing philosophy a lot of industries have. But we like to price things as cheaply as we possibly can, rather than charge as much as we can get. It's a big difference in philosophy, and we try to help other people see that."
Walmart, sucks to be their vendor, great to be their customer. I love it when two things I consider to be evil lock horns. Its why I'm a libertarian.
You will still be living better than you deserve after this depression is over.
And how well do I deserve to live by your estimation? Yes I could survive and thrive on much less. Yes if I ate a vegetarian diet and didn't drive it would take much less land to feed me and I'd use less dinosaur corpses. But exactly how well do I deserve to live, and why do I deserve that much or little?
I owned the white, 12-inch 800 MHz G3 iBook. I hate them now.
Honestly, Apple! Soddering the GPU with a ball grid array upside-down? Yeah, thanks for that!
I had that iBook. The logic board died on me and I never knew about the recall until it was too late. Other than that it was a great machine. How was soldering the GPU in that manner bad?
Well it's really the job of airport security to look for things that are suspicious.
No! It is the job of airport security to look for things that are dangerous enough to threaten the airplane. Just because it is unknown doesn't make it dangerous. A crimping tool, even with cutting blades, doesn't meet that level of threat.
Suspicious is criteria for more careful explanation and questioning. I'm sure that their are weird looking tools intended for airplane maintenance that could cause some damage if someone had the right knowledge. In my ideal world everyone getting on the plane would be issued a sidearm that they qualified with at a range within the past 6 months and no one would have to show ID. However, once we accept that the current search received at an airport is acceptable, we should try to make it most effective.
I would expect questioning or detainment if I bring something particularly weird.
Weird isn't the criteria. Dangerous is the criteria, and in this case that means dangerous to the airplane, not potentially useable as a personal weapon.
Dangerous to other passengers is also the criteria. And as long as I have access to the cockpit from the cabin, a weapon is a threat to the pilot and therefore the plane. Finally dangerous is the criteria for confiscation, weird is criteria for taking a more careful look to determine if something is dangerous.
He was *irate* that I wouldn't help him: after all, he asked politely. That part doesn't bother me, but it turns out he's from corporate IT for my company. That's just scary.
You've obviously never had someone from IT complain that "you have the completely wrong idea about security" because a password was too long.
I was afraid of 2 things (1) the tools being confiscated because they could be used as weapons, and (2) the agents not knowing what they were and detaining me. The fact that you were thinking about it is scary enough already, don't you think? Not that I go through airport security happily singing every time recently - you stand in line and trying to think what did you forget to take out that might be strange looking or hard to explain...:(
Well it's really the job of airport security to look for things that are suspicious. Just like cops are to look for suspicious behavior. So anything out of the ordinary will raise flags. Now, most people have not seen a rj45 crimping tool, and fewer have seen a punch down tool. Now a punch down tool probably cause some damage if you apply it with enough speed and force. So assuming it is acceptable to submit to the search required to get on an airplane, I would expect questioning or detainment if I bring something particularly weird. Crimping and punch down tools are particularly weird. Now, I would expect that worse case scenario is the tools are confiscated I am allowed to get on the plane.
Now, how do you explain that you've just had radiation treatment to the mindless TSA buffoon who's found you're radioactive? What? Oh I get it... because all TSA workers are mindless, buffoons. Just like all blacks like watermelons, Irishmen are drunks, and Italians are in the mob. Of course.
Yeah I once had a set of RJ45 crimping tools in my backpack that I happened to use as carry on luggage. As I waited on line to go through the TSA checkpoint and remembered they were in the bottom of my bag I was afraid of 2 things (1) the tools being confiscated because they could be used as weapons, and (2) the agents not knowing what they were and detaining me. Well they did attract TSA attention. The woman operating the scanning machine asked me if they were "telephone tools" and I said yes. She asked her supervisor who let me go through with them. So yes bringing strange things through airport security will raise eyebrows, but its not always a one way ticket to Gitmo.
What exactly are you getting for your $40K/per year. A computer capable of running any programming language compiler or simulation costs $1K, 10 textbooks that you can conceivable cover in a year are at most another $1K.
Their are some very well paying programming jobs that you absolutely need a degree for. Granted, most are with investment banks and those are failing terribly at the moment. However, barring total economic collapse those jobs will all be there in the long term. Assuming total economic collapse occurs, it should be pretty easy to default on those loans and its possible no one will want to buy your promissory notes when the current holder goes belly up.
Some people want those kinds of jobs. Some people are not entrepreneurs but are willing to work very hard. They want to be told what to do and do it. It is possible to be an intelligent and willing cog.
A lady proficient at programming but currently staying at home with her 2 kids is babysitting my daughter for $40 day. If I needed to learn programming, I am sure she would be happy to teach me 1-on-1 for 3 hours/weekday for about the same money. The rest is just branding. Sure it's worth something at a job interview, but is it worth $320K that you will end up paying for your loan rather than buying a nice house cash down in many places in US?
I'm sure she's quite happy and fulfilled being a mother and has no desire to work full time at the moment. Regardless, I'm quite amazed you found such cheap help. I know a live in helper that makes about 40 grand a year. Thats about $20 an hour. That and visa sponsorship and I would assume healthcare. If they liked her enough to take her from Hong Kong to America, I really can't see them not shelling out for health care.
Now without going into the incredibly pay scale that 12 year old white suburbanite girls get for babysitting, or the money she could make tutoring, I'm sure she just wants spending cash, does not want to expand her business, and is happy that this money is tax free. I also assume that her husband is working a "real job" or she has some other source of income.
Also as a non programmer you are probably not able to judge how good of a programmer she is. I'm sorry but its true. Maybe if you are a very hands on project manager you might be able to, but most people don't understand what good programming is. It takes years of programming before a programmer is capable of judging another.
Haven't you noticed slashdot becoming more of a political "tool" then a place to discuss news for nerds.I guess maybe there wouldn't be enough discusion without the flame though, I don't know.
Three words. Presidential Election Cycle. Most US based sites are going to be quite political.
The fact that you know their salaries should tell you something about the quality of your friends.
The fact that you have no friends you are willing to discuss salary with is something I find curious. Its a matter of friendly competition. Also, part of that friendly competition is knowing where you stand and if your getting ripped off. When someone makes more money than you, you should ask yourself "why"? Are they better programmers? Do they have soft skills like management or people? Are they on a PM track? Are they sleeping with the boss? Yes salaries are a sensitive issue, and should not be disclosed lightly. However, if you can't trust a friend that doesn't work in your company to know how much you make, than you either have trust issues or don't keep trustworthy company.
I wouldn't want right outside, especially a train station if only for the noise. But generally "close" is good.
Well I can (and often do) walk to JFK airport from my house so a train can't be worse than a low flying plane. My grandmother said the concord was much noiser when it first started flying, but it was only slightly louder than a 747 while I was alive. That being said, you get used to the noise, but its an understandable annoyance. Its inconvenient when on the phone or watching TV, but very easy to sleep through. I've heard horror stories of occasional freight trains being forced to stop for whatever reason and blowing their horns excessively at night, but quite frankly, if I was forced to leave NYC proper, I'd love to live in a townhouse that is across the street from a LIRR parking lot.
Having a bus stop in front of your house is only a bad thing if your neighborhood is bad. I would buy the house in front of my bus stop in a heartbeat. Others would cause me some hesitation.
....mentality that says "I don't want a bus stop near my home" and it has some merit Interesting. Being close to public transport is considered a desirable thing where I live (Melbourne AU).
A retired NYPD (New York City) Cop explained to to me this way. If I want to get into the city I can take the Long Island Rail Road (commuter rail). If their is a bus stop in front of my house I will still drive to the rail station, but I have the sort of people that take the bus standing in front of my house.
Now I will say that when I took the bus in Suffolk County New York, I did get the distinct feeling I was the smartest, richest, best educated person on the bus and I was making about half median US income at the time. When I took the bus to Queens (part of NYC) in High School their were students, working poor, working class, and processionals on the bus. So his claim probably had merit since he lived outside of an urban area.
Now police officer is one of the few professions that someone with 90 college credits can get free parking in Manhattan, and they generally only get on buses and trains to deal with crimes. So I can understand why this and many other cops feel that one should drive if they can afford a car.
Sounds sorta like the new lease on my apartment. We're not raising your rent, we're just no longer paying for your water/sewer/heating bill. So, the cost to live in this apartment is going up... sounds like a rent increase to me.
Well your probably getting screwed long term because all those things are going to go up significantly. However, you probably could have asked for a 5 year lease to lock in the rate, if that made sense for your situation. You can also control water and heating to an extent. Realize that the reason for a landlord not wanting to pay utilities is because he cannot control those costs. He can reward good tenants with appliances and repairs because he knows they take care of their apartments. However, a good tenant will not turn his thermostat down to 50 at night if he doesn't pay the bills. Place that bill in the tenants hands and he can decide on his own.
Furthermore, for most couples with children, and chime in if you are one, the difficulty of traveling to and from your home, is a *feature* rather than a flaw -- you don't want people to be able to easily take a bus to a place near your home.
I see a logic flaw here. I'm well aware of the "think of the children/not in my back yard" mentality that says "I don't want a bus stop near my home" and it has some merit. However, the people I don't want near my home are not necessarily traveling a great distance, and can easily take local roads that are not subject to a great deal of rush hour crunch. Also, most of those concerns are best dealt with by making sure their are responsible adults around, be they relatives, neighbors, or paid caregivers.
Also, kidnappings and break ins tend to occur in the small hours when their is little traffic.
I don't mean to offend your daughter, but maybe it's time to get serious with helping her learn. Children are supposed to be able to read and write well enough by age 5.
I didn't begin to learn to read until after I turned 6. It was simply a matter of not being taught until I entered first grade (six and a half). I knew my alphabet, was read to every night, and did well in kindergarten. Regardless of when I should have learned to read, I turned out fine. I had a fourth grade reading level in second grade. 1170 on my SATs Freshmen year of highschool, 1330 by the time I was a Junior. This was before the SATs had an essay section.
Also please define read "well enough." I don't think most first graders could pick up a college history textbook and understand it. I could by middle of second grade. Finally, it really depends on the person. My brother had plenty of extra help both inside and out of school, and never did well in school. Some people are just inherently smarter than other. That natural intelligence can be conditioned by nurture, but there are hard limits.
But then I go home, and having thought of a great feature on the drive home, I FTP into my site, open with a text editor, (insert notepad/BBedit/eMacs/Vi here to taste), and write the code by hand. Even if that means copying an pasting, I... how shall I say this... ***still have to know what I'm doing***. Yeah, all you n00bs, you drag and drop those controls and use F4 to set the properties...Go 'head...
Ok why not ger a copy of visual studio express or sharpdevelop at home? Also how do you compile this.NET code from home? BTW most people that know F4 brons the properties dialog up probably have a clue.
It's news because it's a known issue with Time Machine that now a high profile user is raising. And it's now something that might get fixed.
Whether you like Rush or hate him (I find him amusing), I'm actually quite interested that he not only uses Macs, but has a network of them.
Of course, there will be the standard set of "evil people use Macs?" If someone actually says it in a new way, I may find that entertaining as well.
I'm one of several republican mac users I know. Let me offer you some theories as to why we use them.
We are all intelligent people surrounded by liberals and mocked for our views. This means we are all either contrarians or independent thinkers.
Apple is closer to our preferred form of government than Microsoft. We don't want the government taxing us constantly and telling us what to do. We want them to fight our wars, and pave our roads. We expect our operating system and hardware manufacturer to take a similar approach. Give me an OS, and let third parties make the applications. This is less true these days, but the average apple user tends to use third party applications like photoshop and the average Windows user uses office.
Generally the intelligent lean towards libertarian. Neither party addresses that political segment well. Of recent presidents Ronald Regan was the closest thing to a libertarian. The fact that most people disagree with that statement proves hos non libertarian the government is.
I know, the Mac gives you a bad ass command prompt, but I only know one Mac owner out of many that uses it at all.
Hrm, when I was a unix admin myself, the unix programmer, and the CTO all made good use of the shell prompt. As a matter of fact if I didn't have access to a particular machine due to our ssh key prorogation script not working, the procedure was to call the CTO and allow my x session to accept commands from him machine. He would then send a root xterm to my iBook and I would go get ssh working, install our keys, and do whatever I originally needed to do on the machine. Of course if ssh wasn't on the machine it usually meant you could not get ssh on the machine.
Anyway, if your CS department is *not* a member of MSDNAA, go talk to the dean of the department about joining - as far as I know it's fairly inexpensive.
Once again, your assuming he's in the US, although its possible there are similar programs overseas. Also, in order for that to affect classroom usage, he would have to attend a school that requires him to own a laptop, unless that program also applied to lab PCs. Plus, there are debuggers for other platforms, that while not as nice, integrate with IDEs and let you do the basic "set a debug point and start stepping." Even if they get a professor that believes all students should learn vim, which is not a bad idea, GDB can step through code.
(probably because all the free ones are rubbish and most schools won't shell out for visual studio).
My experience is that the school pays for Visual Studio, but does not teach you how to use it. Also, I don't think Visual Studio is very expensive for a school. The full price is around a grand a seat. Of course if you did not go to school in the USA, ignore everything I just said here.
I do think that after 4 years of college you should have learned how to do things like step through code, use version control, and use a merge tool. The debugger should be taught in the first or second programming class. Version control and merge tools can be taught in a software engineering class. Perhaps pert of that class should be inheriting a legacy code base from a previous running of the class. Another part of the class could be developing a new project from scratch.
It will be assumed that everyone can know everything. But if this is assumed, nothing my work shows ignorance of can be excused. I cannot imagine a PhD defense in the future!
Well I think it will take a while to get to that level. I think people will be very guarded in what they say in their thesis papers. I also think that the professors judging them will be stricter about minutia that can be found on google. There will also be an understanding that one simply cannot google every small fact in a large body of work. Also, don't you constantly meet with your advising professor when doing a thesis? Isn't there a constant review going on that would catch these things in the same manner as typos?
Just because the door is unlocked does not mean you have permission to enter.
Well look at it this way. If I walk into a laundromat and there is no attendant on duty I would not consider myself trespassing. No reasonable person would. I've been to laundromats without attendants on duty. I assume someone opens them up ion the morning, locks them up in the evening and periodically comes buy to refill the vending machines and the like.
If I am a reasonable person on the internet, and a server responds to a zone transfer request, I expect that I am authorized to look at this information,
Notepad supposedly can open ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 (big and little endian) and documents. It can't comprehend the oddball UTF-7 format, though. It helps though if your Unicode documents have a header (BOM) so Notepad can choose the right format.)
The UTF-8 BOM, 2 bytes signifying nothing that have caused myself and many others to waste countless hours arguing over nothing. I'm to angry to go verify that the UTF-8 bom is indeed 2 bytes.
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Why not let them use their own headphones? They probably sound better than $20 speakers. Also, they can turn the volume up louder. Unless all your employees have offices?
Well sometimes maintenance programing will teach you to become a good architect. However, some people won't become good architects ever. They simply lack the ability to design on a large scale. However, these people often make good career maintenance programmers. They can follow any pattern and modify software without falling into the temptation to "improve" it in ways that break it.
Thats not to say that I am against using the position of maintenance programmer for junior programmers. Its a good place to learn, and one should be able to step through an existing code base, find the cause of an issue and resolve it, before being allowed to create their own systems.
In the "hard" engineering disciplines, their tends to be a progression from "inspector" positions, to making minor design changes, to designing systems. This is beginning to take place in software design. However, we have yet to formulate the general industry wide career paths that one finds in the civil, mechanical and electrical fields.
Walmart, sucks to be their vendor, great to be their customer. I love it when two things I consider to be evil lock horns. Its why I'm a libertarian.
And how well do I deserve to live by your estimation? Yes I could survive and thrive on much less. Yes if I ate a vegetarian diet and didn't drive it would take much less land to feed me and I'd use less dinosaur corpses. But exactly how well do I deserve to live, and why do I deserve that much or little?
Honestly, Apple! Soddering the GPU with a ball grid array upside-down? Yeah, thanks for that!
I had that iBook. The logic board died on me and I never knew about the recall until it was too late. Other than that it was a great machine. How was soldering the GPU in that manner bad?
Suspicious is criteria for more careful explanation and questioning. I'm sure that their are weird looking tools intended for airplane maintenance that could cause some damage if someone had the right knowledge. In my ideal world everyone getting on the plane would be issued a sidearm that they qualified with at a range within the past 6 months and no one would have to show ID. However, once we accept that the current search received at an airport is acceptable, we should try to make it most effective.
Weird isn't the criteria. Dangerous is the criteria, and in this case that means dangerous to the airplane, not potentially useable as a personal weapon.Dangerous to other passengers is also the criteria. And as long as I have access to the cockpit from the cabin, a weapon is a threat to the pilot and therefore the plane. Finally dangerous is the criteria for confiscation, weird is criteria for taking a more careful look to determine if something is dangerous.
You've obviously never had someone from IT complain that "you have the completely wrong idea about security" because a password was too long.
Well it's really the job of airport security to look for things that are suspicious. Just like cops are to look for suspicious behavior. So anything out of the ordinary will raise flags. Now, most people have not seen a rj45 crimping tool, and fewer have seen a punch down tool. Now a punch down tool probably cause some damage if you apply it with enough speed and force. So assuming it is acceptable to submit to the search required to get on an airplane, I would expect questioning or detainment if I bring something particularly weird. Crimping and punch down tools are particularly weird. Now, I would expect that worse case scenario is the tools are confiscated I am allowed to get on the plane.
Yeah I once had a set of RJ45 crimping tools in my backpack that I happened to use as carry on luggage. As I waited on line to go through the TSA checkpoint and remembered they were in the bottom of my bag I was afraid of 2 things (1) the tools being confiscated because they could be used as weapons, and (2) the agents not knowing what they were and detaining me. Well they did attract TSA attention. The woman operating the scanning machine asked me if they were "telephone tools" and I said yes. She asked her supervisor who let me go through with them. So yes bringing strange things through airport security will raise eyebrows, but its not always a one way ticket to Gitmo.
Their are some very well paying programming jobs that you absolutely need a degree for. Granted, most are with investment banks and those are failing terribly at the moment. However, barring total economic collapse those jobs will all be there in the long term. Assuming total economic collapse occurs, it should be pretty easy to default on those loans and its possible no one will want to buy your promissory notes when the current holder goes belly up.
Some people want those kinds of jobs. Some people are not entrepreneurs but are willing to work very hard. They want to be told what to do and do it. It is possible to be an intelligent and willing cog.
A lady proficient at programming but currently staying at home with her 2 kids is babysitting my daughter for $40 day. If I needed to learn programming, I am sure she would be happy to teach me 1-on-1 for 3 hours/weekday for about the same money. The rest is just branding. Sure it's worth something at a job interview, but is it worth $320K that you will end up paying for your loan rather than buying a nice house cash down in many places in US?I'm sure she's quite happy and fulfilled being a mother and has no desire to work full time at the moment. Regardless, I'm quite amazed you found such cheap help. I know a live in helper that makes about 40 grand a year. Thats about $20 an hour. That and visa sponsorship and I would assume healthcare. If they liked her enough to take her from Hong Kong to America, I really can't see them not shelling out for health care.
Now without going into the incredibly pay scale that 12 year old white suburbanite girls get for babysitting, or the money she could make tutoring, I'm sure she just wants spending cash, does not want to expand her business, and is happy that this money is tax free. I also assume that her husband is working a "real job" or she has some other source of income.
Also as a non programmer you are probably not able to judge how good of a programmer she is. I'm sorry but its true. Maybe if you are a very hands on project manager you might be able to, but most people don't understand what good programming is. It takes years of programming before a programmer is capable of judging another.
Three words. Presidential Election Cycle. Most US based sites are going to be quite political.
The fact that you have no friends you are willing to discuss salary with is something I find curious. Its a matter of friendly competition. Also, part of that friendly competition is knowing where you stand and if your getting ripped off. When someone makes more money than you, you should ask yourself "why"? Are they better programmers? Do they have soft skills like management or people? Are they on a PM track? Are they sleeping with the boss? Yes salaries are a sensitive issue, and should not be disclosed lightly. However, if you can't trust a friend that doesn't work in your company to know how much you make, than you either have trust issues or don't keep trustworthy company.
Well I can (and often do) walk to JFK airport from my house so a train can't be worse than a low flying plane. My grandmother said the concord was much noiser when it first started flying, but it was only slightly louder than a 747 while I was alive. That being said, you get used to the noise, but its an understandable annoyance. Its inconvenient when on the phone or watching TV, but very easy to sleep through. I've heard horror stories of occasional freight trains being forced to stop for whatever reason and blowing their horns excessively at night, but quite frankly, if I was forced to leave NYC proper, I'd love to live in a townhouse that is across the street from a LIRR parking lot.
Having a bus stop in front of your house is only a bad thing if your neighborhood is bad. I would buy the house in front of my bus stop in a heartbeat. Others would cause me some hesitation.
....mentality that says "I don't want a bus stop near my home" and it has some merit Interesting. Being close to public transport is considered a desirable thing where I live (Melbourne AU).A retired NYPD (New York City) Cop explained to to me this way. If I want to get into the city I can take the Long Island Rail Road (commuter rail). If their is a bus stop in front of my house I will still drive to the rail station, but I have the sort of people that take the bus standing in front of my house.
Now I will say that when I took the bus in Suffolk County New York, I did get the distinct feeling I was the smartest, richest, best educated person on the bus and I was making about half median US income at the time. When I took the bus to Queens (part of NYC) in High School their were students, working poor, working class, and processionals on the bus. So his claim probably had merit since he lived outside of an urban area.
Now police officer is one of the few professions that someone with 90 college credits can get free parking in Manhattan, and they generally only get on buses and trains to deal with crimes. So I can understand why this and many other cops feel that one should drive if they can afford a car.
Well your probably getting screwed long term because all those things are going to go up significantly. However, you probably could have asked for a 5 year lease to lock in the rate, if that made sense for your situation. You can also control water and heating to an extent. Realize that the reason for a landlord not wanting to pay utilities is because he cannot control those costs. He can reward good tenants with appliances and repairs because he knows they take care of their apartments. However, a good tenant will not turn his thermostat down to 50 at night if he doesn't pay the bills. Place that bill in the tenants hands and he can decide on his own.
I see a logic flaw here. I'm well aware of the "think of the children/not in my back yard" mentality that says "I don't want a bus stop near my home" and it has some merit. However, the people I don't want near my home are not necessarily traveling a great distance, and can easily take local roads that are not subject to a great deal of rush hour crunch. Also, most of those concerns are best dealt with by making sure their are responsible adults around, be they relatives, neighbors, or paid caregivers.
Also, kidnappings and break ins tend to occur in the small hours when their is little traffic.
I didn't begin to learn to read until after I turned 6. It was simply a matter of not being taught until I entered first grade (six and a half). I knew my alphabet, was read to every night, and did well in kindergarten. Regardless of when I should have learned to read, I turned out fine. I had a fourth grade reading level in second grade. 1170 on my SATs Freshmen year of highschool, 1330 by the time I was a Junior. This was before the SATs had an essay section.
Also please define read "well enough." I don't think most first graders could pick up a college history textbook and understand it. I could by middle of second grade. Finally, it really depends on the person. My brother had plenty of extra help both inside and out of school, and never did well in school. Some people are just inherently smarter than other. That natural intelligence can be conditioned by nurture, but there are hard limits.
Ok why not ger a copy of visual studio express or sharpdevelop at home? Also how do you compile this .NET code from home? BTW most people that know F4 brons the properties dialog up probably have a clue.
It's news because it's a known issue with Time Machine that now a high profile user is raising. And it's now something that might get fixed.
Whether you like Rush or hate him (I find him amusing), I'm actually quite interested that he not only uses Macs, but has a network of them.
Of course, there will be the standard set of "evil people use Macs?" If someone actually says it in a new way, I may find that entertaining as well.
I'm one of several republican mac users I know. Let me offer you some theories as to why we use them.
Hrm, when I was a unix admin myself, the unix programmer, and the CTO all made good use of the shell prompt. As a matter of fact if I didn't have access to a particular machine due to our ssh key prorogation script not working, the procedure was to call the CTO and allow my x session to accept commands from him machine. He would then send a root xterm to my iBook and I would go get ssh working, install our keys, and do whatever I originally needed to do on the machine. Of course if ssh wasn't on the machine it usually meant you could not get ssh on the machine.
I think I just know better mac people than you.
Once again, your assuming he's in the US, although its possible there are similar programs overseas. Also, in order for that to affect classroom usage, he would have to attend a school that requires him to own a laptop, unless that program also applied to lab PCs. Plus, there are debuggers for other platforms, that while not as nice, integrate with IDEs and let you do the basic "set a debug point and start stepping." Even if they get a professor that believes all students should learn vim, which is not a bad idea, GDB can step through code.
My experience is that the school pays for Visual Studio, but does not teach you how to use it. Also, I don't think Visual Studio is very expensive for a school. The full price is around a grand a seat. Of course if you did not go to school in the USA, ignore everything I just said here.
I do think that after 4 years of college you should have learned how to do things like step through code, use version control, and use a merge tool. The debugger should be taught in the first or second programming class. Version control and merge tools can be taught in a software engineering class. Perhaps pert of that class should be inheriting a legacy code base from a previous running of the class. Another part of the class could be developing a new project from scratch.
Well I think it will take a while to get to that level. I think people will be very guarded in what they say in their thesis papers. I also think that the professors judging them will be stricter about minutia that can be found on google. There will also be an understanding that one simply cannot google every small fact in a large body of work. Also, don't you constantly meet with your advising professor when doing a thesis? Isn't there a constant review going on that would catch these things in the same manner as typos?
Well look at it this way. If I walk into a laundromat and there is no attendant on duty I would not consider myself trespassing. No reasonable person would. I've been to laundromats without attendants on duty. I assume someone opens them up ion the morning, locks them up in the evening and periodically comes buy to refill the vending machines and the like.
If I am a reasonable person on the internet, and a server responds to a zone transfer request, I expect that I am authorized to look at this information,
The UTF-8 BOM, 2 bytes signifying nothing that have caused myself and many others to waste countless hours arguing over nothing. I'm to angry to go verify that the UTF-8 bom is indeed 2 bytes.