the MIS majors were much slower to catch on to software engineering concepts that were pretty much inately intuitive to the CS/CE majors
A lot of people go into CS nowadays because it is supposed to be big bucks when they should be going into it because they like it.
At my University (Ohio State), many people who who couldn't cut it in the CS programs switched to a more businessy MIS program. They did this becuase these programs were easier.
Of course not everyone in MIS, chose the degree for this reason, but when you combine the fact that it is a technically less challenging degree with the fact that maybe 10% + of the students in the program were fallouts from the tougher CS major, you should expect a CS graduate to be much better at solving CS problems on average than an MIS major.
On the other hand, I firmly believe I (CS) would be a truly awful manager and, without 2-3 more years experience, a highly questionable lead anything.
I've recently gone through a lot of interviews, met a lot of students from different universities with different degrees, and gone to some of the OSU CIS department accredidation meetings. What I've found is that the exact title of the degree does not mean a whole lot.
My degree was CIS (Arts and Sciences). I took no business classes at all and ultimately took more math classes than most CS engineering guys. The CS Engineering students took exactly the same computer courses as me (no more, no less). The differences were all in the general education requirements, they had to take chemistry, I had to take spanish and so on.
At our school, MIS students are the business computer science people. They take management courses, light computer courses, and lots of business. Yet, I've met people with MIS degrees that did 2-3 times as much programming through school as I did... although I got the feeling it was more skill based than general purpose (Eg 3 course sequence on Cobol).
The truth of the matter is, Computer Science, in whatever form it takes, is a relatively new field. People all over are trying to figure out what you need to know in order to be successful. This is part of the reason behind the 10 billion different certifications out there. And this is why CS, CSE, MIS, or any other CS related degree can be completely different in different universities.
A couple years ago, very few colleges even had acreditted CS programs. A few months ago, I graduated from the second largest university in the US, from an unacreditted CS program. If you want to get a CS degree, figure out what you want to do with it, and pick a college program that matches those desires.
You think that there will be a consumer version of Windows (what the topic of Dave's column was) that will match the stability of any flavor of Unix by 12/31/2003. Really?
Probably just about. Most consumers don't need computers with uptimes of years. Having worked with NT/2000 a bit, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think the consumer version of XP will be fairly stable. For the most part, it will probably depend on how MS handles approving drivers. Considering that consumers have put up with daily crashes for years, a switch to an NT based system will be such a dramatic change that they'll feel the OS is virtually crash free.
isn't the fact that it's free - completely, no strings attached, free - a good enough reason?
"Being free," is never enough. DOS is essentially free, but it doesn't have enough of anything. BeOS was free, but it didn't have the software I wanted. Linux is free, but it can be difficult to use. Windows is perceptually free to most end users since it comes loaded on their store bought system, but it crashes everyday.
Being free is never enough. And more to the point, nothing is free, especially Linux. It takes days and weeks and months of work to learn how to do the things you want to do. Just because something doesn't cost any money up front, doesn't mean it is without cost.
Too many people come out of college with no idea about the low level computer operation...
General knowledge is necessary, but not everyone coming out of college goes into work where they need to know lots about low level OS specific stuff. As a result, colleges don't typically teach students how Solaris/BSD/Linux/NT handle each and every little design decision.
Have you ever installed Linux or similar Unix on your computer?
I liked your first question about writing programs outside of class, but unless you are interviewing for a Unix specific question, making home-based Unix knowledge a prerequisite for employment seems more like OS bigotry than anything else. I know plenty of people that are very adapt in the windows realm, and have no desire to leave it. Similarly, I know many students who are content to use the school Solaris accounts for personal use. There are probably thousands of skills out there to be learned and people may just rather spend their time on Visual Studio, Perl, ASP, Cobol, Fortran, COM, DCOM, etc....
My personal opinion is college is overrated.
I agree. Many of my fellow students are not passionate enough about what they do to independently complete their education. In school you learn methods and principles. On your own you need to learn to apply these methods and principles with specific skills. In my experience few do this. On the other hand, I will say that having the formal education college provides is a definite advatage. My father works with a self-taught/trained on job mechanical engineer in his mid 50's. Every once in a while I hear a complaint about how the guy doesn't understand what he wants, uses his own method instead of the "best" one, or just takes too long to get the job done. The impression I get is that this fellow has been doing things mostly his own way for 30 years. He's gotten fairly good at it, but at a basic level, he does things differently. This can make communication harder. Also, sometimes he just gets the job done as opposed to getting it done very well. My experience in industry is that people want to see things done on time. In college, teachers focus on the best ways of doing things (like sorting algorithms, the advatages vs disadvantages of OO and structured programming, etc). I would guess these are the kinds of things that could take a very long time to completely learn alone while trying to meet deadlines. A college education is often over-rated but it is definitely valuable.
At OSU, our main labs are Solaris and our secondaries are NT (mostly for the intro programming courses).
don't teach programming-- they teach Visual Basic.
The intro software development sequence is taught using OSU's own language called RESOLVE (http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~weide/rsrg/RSRG-in struction.html). This is essentially a stricter, more object oriented version of C++. Many of the students have complained about it since it sometimes hinders applying for co-ops/internships, but the University remains firm in its choice. To my knowledge, there is no course on Visual Basic unless it exists as some extension of the Business school. Since virtually all our work is done on Solaris machines, it wouldn't even be feasible to code non-language specific assignments in VB. Furthermore, the only technology specific courses I am aware of are the dinky 1 credit hour language courses. The rest is non vendor specific real solid Computer Science.
They don't teach networking-- they teach setting up MS-NT servers, and configuring Cisco routers
My Intro to Networking class sadly did not involve any hands on experience. We mostly talked about Network Layers, Different Protocols, stuff like Ethernet, Sliding Window, TCP/IP, UDP, Token Ring, FDD, CRC's, HTTP, latency, and bandwidth issues. Of course many things we talked about in class I messed around with a little at home.
give professors $100 just for a favorable mention during a lecture of their products
I only had one professor who brought up Microsoft with any frequency in class. This was Anish Aurora (http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~anish/) for my Operating Systems class. He had recently spent a year working at Microsoft and was intamately familiar with how NT handled several Operating System specific issues. Even then he did his best to give equal time to other OSes. Most of my other teachers had slightly to extremely anti-Microsoft feelings. I think my LISP teacher referred to it as the "Evil Empire."
Talks about Linux all the time to be 'leet, but still gave me a resume done in Word...
As someone whose just finished my job search, I can say that most employers want resumes in word or text formats. If you are giving it to a human it will most likely go through HR and your best bet is to give them a word format. If it's being fed to a database, text is probably best. It doesn't matter how much you like linux, that's just the way things are done nowadays. If you are anti-word, you can try to make changes after you're hired.
... on his pirated Win2K partition.
I graduated from OSU last August and I can tell you Microsoft doesn't care if college kids pirate their software. In fact Microsoft was giving OfficeXP/2K, WindowsXP/2K, and Visual Studio 6 to any student that joined the MS sponsored Microsoft club. If you didn't want to go to the one or two meetings it takes to achieve membership, then you could purchase the Buckeye Bundle for $99 (http://www.osu.edu/bookstore/buckeyebundle/). This included whatever Microsoft software you wanted 98/NT/2000/XP/Office/Visual Studio. So I guess I'm just trying to say that while I realize Piracy occurs a lot at the college level, it is not like Piracy at the professional level. Microsoft is already willing to give their software away to students, and frankly it's in their best interests to do so. You can see the results in this article.
Schools are a tough nut to crack for OSS...
Colleges are hotbeds of Open Source activity... at least mine was. I think the MS club was starting to gain a lot more support around the time I graduated though (frightening).
If you ask me (and no one did), Linux needs a collaborative (RedHat, Mandrake, SUSE, Debian, etc) Linux advertising campaign on TV, radio, print, and in Universities. RedHat and other distributions need to allocate resources to fighting the MS PR machine. For every monthly Microsoft Speaker (at OSU) talking about MS SQL Server, there needs to be a guy from RedHat talking about MySQL and handing out cds... even if its only some sort of video conferencing event set up by the local Open Source club.
Alan Cooper wrote a whole book [amazon.com] about how letting computer nerds design computer programs is wrong and stupid.
I'm having flashbacks to the Simpson's episode where Homer designed a new car for market/sale by his long lost brother. The next time we saw his brother he was homeless.
Of course there are things to gain... Combining multiple related products into a single product transfers several benefits:
1) Same UI, wouldn't it be cool if instead of having an oven/a microwave/a toaster, you had an oven-owave-oaster with a single user interface? Similarly would you rather have seperate devices/volume controls for your cd, tape, and record players?
2)In theory, you could reduce development costs in the long term since it will probably take less people to support one big application than it did to support the apps that were its parts.
Users can use the machine without logging in by properly setting up gdm.
One of the big problems with linux is the use of abbreviations and the non-centrality of configuration programs. A newbie might have no clue what gdm is, where he should find it, how to use it, what it does... but perhaps more to the point, mentally there is nothing intuitive to connect log on features with a program called gdm. 3 and 4 letter command names are a relic of software design from the 70s
Rigth now with modular linux kernels and the fact that 99% of drivers are included with the kernel I think this is far better right now that anything microsoft has come up with.
What planet are you from? Linux hardware support lags way behind windows hardware support. Simply installing an sblive on my debian system took an Act of God when it takes me 5 minutes on any windows system... not to mention linux doesn't always support all the features of a piece of hardware.
The Gnome/KDE thing I think is a strength. Learn the one you like or use, ignore the other. it really is that simple.
Oh that just works great when you switch companies, go to the computer lab at school, and go home and every linux system has a different user interface and the maintainers have chosen not to allow installation of your favorite for support reasons. It ain't simple.
Re:My crutch doesn't exist because I need it
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First, there are not various equal, dissimilar, and arbitrary lines of science from which I am asked to choose.
Alright, give me the scientific explanation for the beginning of the universe. Big Bang? Oscillating Universe? Steady State? How about the nature of subatomic particles? Science is full of various equal, dissimilar, and arbitrary lines to choose from. Exploring and eliminating these choices is how scientific progress is accomplished.
a book 2000 years old that's been translated a dozen times by religious fanatics is supposed to convince you There are many 2000 year old books that have been translated many many times by religious fanatics and still have true content/information. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, the Cult of Pythagoras, etc. You can't assume information is incorrect because it is old. That said, a book by itself would not convince me absolutely of any past event, whether it be the Bible, the Koran, my copy of Code Breakers, or my 8th Grade History Book.
"Don't take it literally" is a standard argument that comes back from a bible thumper after an argument.... if I can't take it literally what do I have but reason to make sense of it? Why should the "correct" interpretation be contrary to reason and experience?
Perhaps they use it so often because it's a good argument. All that I would ask would be that you apply your reasoning skills to a book like the Bible rather than dismiss the entire thing outright. It seems highly improbable that more than 25% of the information therein remains valid. That said, it seems extremely unlikely that everything in it is false. I've read Aristotle's Physics and think that over half of it was crap, BUT I also realize that some of things he talked about are true and remain useful. What I'm trying to say here is, if you are really interested, you should read the bible (I havn't) and then draw conclusions as to how much and which parts may contain truth. Anyways, I'm not a bible thumper, I never even read the thing. I'm about as close to being a Christian as I am to being a Disciple of the Cult of Mithras, Priest of Chronos, or a Mary Kay sales rep.
1. Probably OS-dependent.
Who cares if it is? Platform dependencies are not a reason to not create software. Targetting Windows would be a big start anyway.
2. Human link involved. Those who tend to use encryption tend to block this type of thing from happening to their machine anyway. Yet another reason not to open email/attachments from an addresser named "CIA"
People can be idiots, even people who use encryption. The article talked about the FBI (not CIA) sending mail from friends/family of the target, possibly with their cooperation. If I recieved an executable, I'd probably email the person asking them what it was, if they told me something credible, I might open it.
3. Network link involved. Those who use encryption are usually savvy enough to detect extra packets flying from their machine to some unknown address.
People can be idiots, even people who use encryption. I mean, they only need one packet to escape with your key, after which the program could delete itself. And what if it transmitted on a well known unblocked port like 25 (smtp)... or more likely what if it tricked your email program into sending an email to L33T@fbi.gov?
Re:Wow! I'm underwhelmed.
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But what about a dvd drive and a GeForce3. That's another $250... and your figures already add up to about $300. And let's not forget about the ability to play XBox games. I think the point here is you can get a kick ass gaming system/dvd player that can also do about 11 billion other things with a little tinkering.
Re:My crutch doesn't exist because I need it
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Why do you believe Christianity? It's what was given to you.
People today believe in science because it was given to them.
What good would it do for me to know when and how it started?
It's hard to know what good anything can do you until you understand it.
There are probably plenty of chemists and physicists that can prove that no one 2000 years ago had the ability to turn water into wine
No one can prove that. It would be like trying to prove a program correct for all possible input without having the source code and without knowing the state of the machine running the program. Maybe there are some special set of conditions that existed 2000 years ago that could allow such an event to occur. Maybe its a metaphor.
recently there has been research done on Carribean islands proving distinct but similar evolution of anoles between neighboring islands. DNA comparison shows similar ancestry for various types on one island, but not between similar types between islands.
Not proven. Here's an alternative explanation. The designer instantiated the anoles on each island with different code. DNA similarities are frequently used to promote evolution, but imagine you're writing the software for life and tell me your not going to recycle some of your code. Object Oriented all the way baby.
Should you say that none of these are proof, then stop going to the doctor, because the same methods are used
Practical Science is not composed of a series of impeccable proofs. Rather it tends towards a series of working theories. Some of these theories might be true, some might be very wrong, and some may have odd exceptions. In any case, one does not have to reject all science's working theories simply because one wishes to question a few.
I assure you that there is no reason to believe that any man can walk on water
Jesus wasn't exactly Phil in accounting. Having never met a Son of God, it's rather difficult for me to gauge his bouyancy. Also, I'm not a big religion guy but what if the water was frozen? If you take everything litteraly, you're bound to misinterprate 50% of what normal people say today and 99% of what they said 2000 years ago.
Is that more credible than centuries of consistent experience, as well as your own experience, that says it couldn't have happened?
Centuries of consistent experience is not always a great gauge of reality. I mean the earth is flat right, everyone's known that for milenia. If it wasn't we'd all fall off. I'm not trying to say that some old book like the bible is any better at portraying reality, I'm just saying that sometimes it isn't any worse.
On a side note, I've never been to church except when it involved a superbowl party with lots of pizza. Also, I have no fixed faith, just a vague appreciation for stuff.
A quick search on Monster.com for +mysql +linux in Info Tech reveals several companies. Whether or not any of these are exclusively linux shops is highly debatable. Browsing through the descriptions some seemed to be using a mixture of different things.
Silicomm Corporation
Alabanza Corporation
VIP e-Commerce.com, LLC
IU Bitnet
Bulkregister.com
Bizland.com
Homestore.com
ING Bank, fsb
Blackboard, Inc.
Express Logistics
bluebox communications
Pyxis Corporation
CareScience, Inc.
Ticketmaster
Express Technologies Inc.
One thing I had always thought about doing, go out and work a few years in CS. Then after you've saved up a nice sum, go back into education. This way you've got money and real experience: both should help you prepare for life in the classroom.
*Some people are constantly interrupted by costumers or collegues with the sort of stupid questions that they could've easily figured out themselfs *The ability to say to people that come to you with stupid questions that they should investigate it further before coming to you
Better to spend a half hour showing them how to find the answer than to tell them in five minutes or leave them to flounder on their own for two hours. Teach a man to fish....
Any interface that reads minds could be a very bad idea. Implemented badly it could force users to restrict the ways they think. Implemented any way, it would most likely force the user to adapt his thinking in a way beneficial to the computer interface.
Well, I had a long winded argument that got erased after I previewed it, so here's the short version. People will never contribute equally to a project unless they are adequately motivated to do so. Some people don't care if they get an A or a C so why should they spend all that extra effort on something to get an A. From their perspective it just doesn't make sense.
Here is the problem. Too many people take a class because it is required to graduate, they attend, do homework, and code projects to get a grade (A,B,C, or D). The real motivation ought to be aquisition of knowledge and practice in your field, however somewhere in the world of academia the primary goal for many became a grade/diploma. What's the best way to make people do work because they want to? Remove the grades. Make the work more interesting/applicable.
they are going to program their tendancies into said AI
Oh God, they will force us all onto giant chess boards while they manipulate us and watch us battle to the death from afar. Our only break from the torture will be when the machines -ALT- -TAB- out to examine their massive porn collections.
I think if as many virus writers targetted the recommended Solaris patch clusters as target microsoft products, it would be an entirely different story. Seriously, for every Solaris 8 box that gets compromised, there are 50 Windows boses that need to be wiped. Well sometimes it feels like there are about 50 times as many people writing viruses for windows as there are for unix.
On the other hand, the variety of unix distros probably makes them fairly resistant to many broad attacks anyway. Also unix's user friendly qualities probably work against virus writers and script kiddies.
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the MIS majors were much slower to catch on to software engineering concepts that were pretty much inately intuitive to the CS/CE majors
A lot of people go into CS nowadays because it is supposed to be big bucks when they should be going into it because they like it.
At my University (Ohio State), many people who who couldn't cut it in the CS programs switched to a more businessy MIS program. They did this becuase these programs were easier.
Of course not everyone in MIS, chose the degree for this reason, but when you combine the fact that it is a technically less challenging degree with the fact that maybe 10% + of the students in the program were fallouts from the tougher CS major, you should expect a CS graduate to be much better at solving CS problems on average than an MIS major.
On the other hand, I firmly believe I (CS) would be a truly awful manager and, without 2-3 more years experience, a highly questionable lead anything.
MIS is not a CS degree. Most CS people laugh at these people. Sorry but it's true.
True, but that just makes us bigger dicks than we already are, not to mention pissing off our future MIS bosses.
(Just graduated Ohio State)
I've recently gone through a lot of interviews, met a lot of students from different universities with different degrees, and gone to some of the OSU CIS department accredidation meetings. What I've found is that the exact title of the degree does not mean a whole lot.
My degree was CIS (Arts and Sciences). I took no business classes at all and ultimately took more math classes than most CS engineering guys. The CS Engineering students took exactly the same computer courses as me (no more, no less). The differences were all in the general education requirements, they had to take chemistry, I had to take spanish and so on.
At our school, MIS students are the business computer science people. They take management courses, light computer courses, and lots of business. Yet, I've met people with MIS degrees that did 2-3 times as much programming through school as I did... although I got the feeling it was more skill based than general purpose (Eg 3 course sequence on Cobol).
The truth of the matter is, Computer Science, in whatever form it takes, is a relatively new field. People all over are trying to figure out what you need to know in order to be successful. This is part of the reason behind the 10 billion different certifications out there. And this is why CS, CSE, MIS, or any other CS related degree can be completely different in different universities.
A couple years ago, very few colleges even had acreditted CS programs. A few months ago, I graduated from the second largest university in the US, from an unacreditted CS program. If you want to get a CS degree, figure out what you want to do with it, and pick a college program that matches those desires.
You think that there will be a consumer version of Windows (what the topic of Dave's column was) that will match the stability of any flavor of Unix by 12/31/2003. Really?
Probably just about. Most consumers don't need computers with uptimes of years. Having worked with NT/2000 a bit, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think the consumer version of XP will be fairly stable. For the most part, it will probably depend on how MS handles approving drivers. Considering that consumers have put up with daily crashes for years, a switch to an NT based system will be such a dramatic change that they'll feel the OS is virtually crash free.
isn't the fact that it's free - completely, no strings attached, free - a good enough reason?
"Being free," is never enough. DOS is essentially free, but it doesn't have enough of anything. BeOS was free, but it didn't have the software I wanted. Linux is free, but it can be difficult to use. Windows is perceptually free to most end users since it comes loaded on their store bought system, but it crashes everyday. Being free is never enough. And more to the point, nothing is free, especially Linux. It takes days and weeks and months of work to learn how to do the things you want to do. Just because something doesn't cost any money up front, doesn't mean it is without cost.
Too many people come out of college with no idea about the low level computer operation...
General knowledge is necessary, but not everyone coming out of college goes into work where they need to know lots about low level OS specific stuff. As a result, colleges don't typically teach students how Solaris/BSD/Linux/NT handle each and every little design decision.
Have you ever installed Linux or similar Unix on your computer?
I liked your first question about writing programs outside of class, but unless you are interviewing for a Unix specific question, making home-based Unix knowledge a prerequisite for employment seems more like OS bigotry than anything else. I know plenty of people that are very adapt in the windows realm, and have no desire to leave it. Similarly, I know many students who are content to use the school Solaris accounts for personal use. There are probably thousands of skills out there to be learned and people may just rather spend their time on Visual Studio, Perl, ASP, Cobol, Fortran, COM, DCOM, etc....
My personal opinion is college is overrated.
I agree. Many of my fellow students are not passionate enough about what they do to independently complete their education. In school you learn methods and principles. On your own you need to learn to apply these methods and principles with specific skills. In my experience few do this. On the other hand, I will say that having the formal education college provides is a definite advatage. My father works with a self-taught/trained on job mechanical engineer in his mid 50's. Every once in a while I hear a complaint about how the guy doesn't understand what he wants, uses his own method instead of the "best" one, or just takes too long to get the job done. The impression I get is that this fellow has been doing things mostly his own way for 30 years. He's gotten fairly good at it, but at a basic level, he does things differently. This can make communication harder. Also, sometimes he just gets the job done as opposed to getting it done very well. My experience in industry is that people want to see things done on time. In college, teachers focus on the best ways of doing things (like sorting algorithms, the advatages vs disadvantages of OO and structured programming, etc). I would guess these are the kinds of things that could take a very long time to completely learn alone while trying to meet deadlines. A college education is often over-rated but it is definitely valuable.
At OSU, our main labs are Solaris and our secondaries are NT (mostly for the intro programming courses).
n struction.html). This is essentially a stricter, more object oriented version of C++. Many of the students have complained about it since it sometimes hinders applying for co-ops/internships, but the University remains firm in its choice. To my knowledge, there is no course on Visual Basic unless it exists as some extension of the Business school. Since virtually all our work is done on Solaris machines, it wouldn't even be feasible to code non-language specific assignments in VB. Furthermore, the only technology specific courses I am aware of are the dinky 1 credit hour language courses. The rest is non vendor specific real solid Computer Science.
don't teach programming-- they teach Visual Basic.
The intro software development sequence is taught using OSU's own language called RESOLVE (http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~weide/rsrg/RSRG-i
They don't teach networking-- they teach setting up MS-NT servers, and configuring Cisco routers
My Intro to Networking class sadly did not involve any hands on experience. We mostly talked about Network Layers, Different Protocols, stuff like Ethernet, Sliding Window, TCP/IP, UDP, Token Ring, FDD, CRC's, HTTP, latency, and bandwidth issues. Of course many things we talked about in class I messed around with a little at home.
give professors $100 just for a favorable mention during a lecture of their products
I only had one professor who brought up Microsoft with any frequency in class. This was Anish Aurora (http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~anish/) for my Operating Systems class. He had recently spent a year working at Microsoft and was intamately familiar with how NT handled several Operating System specific issues. Even then he did his best to give equal time to other OSes. Most of my other teachers had slightly to extremely anti-Microsoft feelings. I think my LISP teacher referred to it as the "Evil Empire."
Talks about Linux all the time to be 'leet, but still gave me a resume done in Word...
... on his pirated Win2K partition.
As someone whose just finished my job search, I can say that most employers want resumes in word or text formats. If you are giving it to a human it will most likely go through HR and your best bet is to give them a word format. If it's being fed to a database, text is probably best. It doesn't matter how much you like linux, that's just the way things are done nowadays. If you are anti-word, you can try to make changes after you're hired.
I graduated from OSU last August and I can tell you Microsoft doesn't care if college kids pirate their software. In fact Microsoft was giving OfficeXP/2K, WindowsXP/2K, and Visual Studio 6 to any student that joined the MS sponsored Microsoft club. If you didn't want to go to the one or two meetings it takes to achieve membership, then you could purchase the Buckeye Bundle for $99 (http://www.osu.edu/bookstore/buckeyebundle/). This included whatever Microsoft software you wanted 98/NT/2000/XP/Office/Visual Studio. So I guess I'm just trying to say that while I realize Piracy occurs a lot at the college level, it is not like Piracy at the professional level. Microsoft is already willing to give their software away to students, and frankly it's in their best interests to do so. You can see the results in this article.
Schools are a tough nut to crack for OSS...
Colleges are hotbeds of Open Source activity... at least mine was. I think the MS club was starting to gain a lot more support around the time I graduated though (frightening).
If you ask me (and no one did), Linux needs a collaborative (RedHat, Mandrake, SUSE, Debian, etc) Linux advertising campaign on TV, radio, print, and in Universities. RedHat and other distributions need to allocate resources to fighting the MS PR machine. For every monthly Microsoft Speaker (at OSU) talking about MS SQL Server, there needs to be a guy from RedHat talking about MySQL and handing out cds... even if its only some sort of video conferencing event set up by the local Open Source club.
Alan Cooper wrote a whole book [amazon.com] about how letting computer nerds design computer programs is wrong and stupid.
I'm having flashbacks to the Simpson's episode where Homer designed a new car for market/sale by his long lost brother. The next time we saw his brother he was homeless.
Of course there are things to gain... Combining multiple related products into a single product transfers several benefits:
1) Same UI, wouldn't it be cool if instead of having an oven/a microwave/a toaster, you had an oven-owave-oaster with a single user interface? Similarly would you rather have seperate devices/volume controls for your cd, tape, and record players?
2)In theory, you could reduce development costs in the long term since it will probably take less people to support one big application than it did to support the apps that were its parts.
Users can use the machine without logging in by properly setting up gdm.
One of the big problems with linux is the use of abbreviations and the non-centrality of configuration programs. A newbie might have no clue what gdm is, where he should find it, how to use it, what it does... but perhaps more to the point, mentally there is nothing intuitive to connect log on features with a program called gdm. 3 and 4 letter command names are a relic of software design from the 70s
Rigth now with modular linux kernels and the fact that 99% of drivers are included with the kernel I think this is far better right now that anything microsoft has come up with.
What planet are you from? Linux hardware support lags way behind windows hardware support. Simply installing an sblive on my debian system took an Act of God when it takes me 5 minutes on any windows system... not to mention linux doesn't always support all the features of a piece of hardware.
The Gnome/KDE thing I think is a strength. Learn the one you like or use, ignore the other. it really is that simple.
Oh that just works great when you switch companies, go to the computer lab at school, and go home and every linux system has a different user interface and the maintainers have chosen not to allow installation of your favorite for support reasons. It ain't simple.
First, there are not various equal, dissimilar, and arbitrary lines of science from which I am asked to choose.
.... if I can't take it literally what do I have but reason to make sense of it? Why should the "correct" interpretation be contrary to reason and experience?
Alright, give me the scientific explanation for the beginning of the universe. Big Bang? Oscillating Universe? Steady State? How about the nature of subatomic particles? Science is full of various equal, dissimilar, and arbitrary lines to choose from. Exploring and eliminating these choices is how scientific progress is accomplished.
a book 2000 years old that's been translated a dozen times by religious fanatics is supposed to convince you
There are many 2000 year old books that have been translated many many times by religious fanatics and still have true content/information. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, the Cult of Pythagoras, etc. You can't assume information is incorrect because it is old. That said, a book by itself would not convince me absolutely of any past event, whether it be the Bible, the Koran, my copy of Code Breakers, or my 8th Grade History Book.
"Don't take it literally" is a standard argument that comes back from a bible thumper after an argument
Perhaps they use it so often because it's a good argument. All that I would ask would be that you apply your reasoning skills to a book like the Bible rather than dismiss the entire thing outright. It seems highly improbable that more than 25% of the information therein remains valid. That said, it seems extremely unlikely that everything in it is false. I've read Aristotle's Physics and think that over half of it was crap, BUT I also realize that some of things he talked about are true and remain useful. What I'm trying to say here is, if you are really interested, you should read the bible (I havn't) and then draw conclusions as to how much and which parts may contain truth. Anyways, I'm not a bible thumper, I never even read the thing. I'm about as close to being a Christian as I am to being a Disciple of the Cult of Mithras, Priest of Chronos, or a Mary Kay sales rep.
1. Probably OS-dependent.
Who cares if it is? Platform dependencies are not a reason to not create software. Targetting Windows would be a big start anyway.
2. Human link involved. Those who tend to use encryption tend to block this type of thing from happening to their machine anyway. Yet another reason not to open email/attachments from an addresser named "CIA"
People can be idiots, even people who use encryption. The article talked about the FBI (not CIA) sending mail from friends/family of the target, possibly with their cooperation. If I recieved an executable, I'd probably email the person asking them what it was, if they told me something credible, I might open it.
3. Network link involved. Those who use encryption are usually savvy enough to detect extra packets flying from their machine to some unknown address.
People can be idiots, even people who use encryption. I mean, they only need one packet to escape with your key, after which the program could delete itself. And what if it transmitted on a well known unblocked port like 25 (smtp)... or more likely what if it tricked your email program into sending an email to L33T@fbi.gov?
But what about a dvd drive and a GeForce3. That's another $250... and your figures already add up to about $300. And let's not forget about the ability to play XBox games. I think the point here is you can get a kick ass gaming system/dvd player that can also do about 11 billion other things with a little tinkering.
Why do you believe Christianity? It's what was given to you.
People today believe in science because it was given to them.
What good would it do for me to know when and how it started?
It's hard to know what good anything can do you until you understand it.
There are probably plenty of chemists and physicists that can prove that no one 2000 years ago had the ability to turn water into wine
No one can prove that. It would be like trying to prove a program correct for all possible input without having the source code and without knowing the state of the machine running the program. Maybe there are some special set of conditions that existed 2000 years ago that could allow such an event to occur. Maybe its a metaphor.
recently there has been research done on Carribean islands proving distinct but similar evolution of anoles between neighboring islands. DNA comparison shows similar ancestry for various types on one island, but not between similar types between islands.
Not proven. Here's an alternative explanation. The designer instantiated the anoles on each island with different code. DNA similarities are frequently used to promote evolution, but imagine you're writing the software for life and tell me your not going to recycle some of your code. Object Oriented all the way baby.
Should you say that none of these are proof, then stop going to the doctor, because the same methods are used
Practical Science is not composed of a series of impeccable proofs. Rather it tends towards a series of working theories. Some of these theories might be true, some might be very wrong, and some may have odd exceptions. In any case, one does not have to reject all science's working theories simply because one wishes to question a few.
I assure you that there is no reason to believe that any man can walk on water
Jesus wasn't exactly Phil in accounting. Having never met a Son of God, it's rather difficult for me to gauge his bouyancy. Also, I'm not a big religion guy but what if the water was frozen? If you take everything litteraly, you're bound to misinterprate 50% of what normal people say today and 99% of what they said 2000 years ago.
Is that more credible than centuries of consistent experience, as well as your own experience, that says it couldn't have happened?
Centuries of consistent experience is not always a great gauge of reality. I mean the earth is flat right, everyone's known that for milenia. If it wasn't we'd all fall off. I'm not trying to say that some old book like the bible is any better at portraying reality, I'm just saying that sometimes it isn't any worse.
On a side note, I've never been to church except when it involved a superbowl party with lots of pizza. Also, I have no fixed faith, just a vague appreciation for stuff.
A quick search on Monster.com for +mysql +linux in Info Tech reveals several companies. Whether or not any of these are exclusively linux shops is highly debatable. Browsing through the descriptions some seemed to be using a mixture of different things.
Silicomm Corporation Alabanza Corporation VIP e-Commerce.com, LLC IU Bitnet Bulkregister.com Bizland.com Homestore.com ING Bank, fsb Blackboard, Inc. Express Logistics bluebox communications Pyxis Corporation CareScience, Inc. Ticketmaster Express Technologies Inc.
One thing I had always thought about doing, go out and work a few years in CS. Then after you've saved up a nice sum, go back into education. This way you've got money and real experience: both should help you prepare for life in the classroom.
*Some people are constantly interrupted by costumers or collegues with the sort of stupid questions that they could've easily figured out themselfs
*The ability to say to people that come to you with stupid questions that they should investigate it further before coming to you
Better to spend a half hour showing them how to find the answer than to tell them in five minutes or leave them to flounder on their own for two hours. Teach a man to fish....
The sound of the worm wriggling off the hook and into millions of Outlook clients.
Any interface that reads minds could be a very bad idea. Implemented badly it could force users to restrict the ways they think. Implemented any way, it would most likely force the user to adapt his thinking in a way beneficial to the computer interface.
Well, I had a long winded argument that got erased after I previewed it, so here's the short version. People will never contribute equally to a project unless they are adequately motivated to do so. Some people don't care if they get an A or a C so why should they spend all that extra effort on something to get an A. From their perspective it just doesn't make sense.
Here is the problem. Too many people take a class because it is required to graduate, they attend, do homework, and code projects to get a grade (A,B,C, or D). The real motivation ought to be aquisition of knowledge and practice in your field, however somewhere in the world of academia the primary goal for many became a grade/diploma. What's the best way to make people do work because they want to? Remove the grades. Make the work more interesting/applicable.
they are going to program their tendancies into said AI
Oh God, they will force us all onto giant chess boards while they manipulate us and watch us battle to the death from afar. Our only break from the torture will be when the machines -ALT- -TAB- out to examine their massive porn collections.
Enslavement, bah, that happened decades ago with the invention of the alarm clock.
My room-mate tells me he once got a Wild Wild West screen-saver as part of a "critical update" for a win98 machine.
I think if as many virus writers targetted the recommended Solaris patch clusters as target microsoft products, it would be an entirely different story. Seriously, for every Solaris 8 box that gets compromised, there are 50 Windows boses that need to be wiped. Well sometimes it feels like there are about 50 times as many people writing viruses for windows as there are for unix.
On the other hand, the variety of unix distros probably makes them fairly resistant to many broad attacks anyway. Also unix's user friendly qualities probably work against virus writers and script kiddies.