Failure to accept this is only going to widen the gulf, unless MS, through largesse or coincidence follows the new standard.
Ha. They're already "standard," as you pointed out. The symptomology you're referring to exists in every industry where there is a giant and a bunch of competitors collectively represent a minority part of the market. Only the competitors benefit from an "open standard," as the market leader has already set their own standard.
This is true. But then, that's always the way it's been: the less financially capable states benefit asymmetrically well under the Feds. Same is true for other things as well: they get disproportionately more defense per dollar of investment, and so on. No real surprise here, right?
Where in the Constitution does it give the federal government the authority to construct such a bridge in just Alaska?
Authority to both tax and spend is in the Constitution.
Insofar as we continue to have federal taxes, the People of Alaska are well within their rights to expect value back for them. Yes, the tax system is probably inverted. Yes, if we are to have taxes as high as they are, it should be the States with the high taxes and the Feds with the low. That's not how it is, though, so in this particular case, Alaskans pushing for Federal money is perfectly ethical.
I would agree, based on a general principle. As a young person, when in doubt, take the harder path. The harder degree opens more doors, and when you are young, opening doors is why you are getting your quals, even when you don't know what you want to do exactly. As other posters in this thread have stated, there is no job for which an IT degree qualifies you that a CS degree does not qualify you better. Go for the CS degree. A little bit of a side note: like the person I am responding to stated, some CS degrees are now programming degrees. Some are more mathy and theoretical. If you believe that you can tolerate the math and theory, go for it. If not, either pick a software engineering major or make sure the CS degree you are going for is in line with your plans for four-to-five years of your life.
The IT degree is meaningless. I can only see a couple of valid reasons to get an IT degree. 1) you believe you can't cut the harder degree, or 2) you are doing something like an IT-MBA combo or IT-law combo (such as for intellectual property attorney), where the IT is more a quick way to become generally aware of but not particularly strong in technology.
Well; I could believe that the law says what the law says. But the difference between physical keys and encryption keys is that with the latter, one must *literally* testify in order to divulge them. This requires written or verbal testimony, which would superficially seem to me to be what the 5th prohibits. Anyway, I am skeptical that they "treat it like evidence had been found," but I could believe that they might find one in contempt.
Back to your physical lock example (and disregarding how the law or courts actually work), if one were to suppose that the door were locked with a combination lock, demanding the combination from the suspect would likewise seem to me to be spiritually against the purpose of the 5th. By all means, with warrant issued cut the lock off, but don't demand that the suspect facilitate in implicating his own guilt!
"It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that are used to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as DRM) and criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, even when there is no infringement of copyright itself."
Sadly, at least here in the Unfree States of America, DRM **is** most assuredly the law.
Civil discovery is a very frightening process: you can be compelled (under pain of contempt punishments) to produce anything the opposing lawyers ask for that is remotely relevant (might lead to evidence). Encryption is useless, you have to produce plaintext.
True. And if you are later somehow discovered to have not divulged the relevant material in a True Crypt hidden volume, both heaping civil penalties as well as probable criminal ones would apply. This is unlike a criminal case, where witholding evidence that could implicate you in a crime is definitionally legal, along with lying about your innocence, which is just considered a convoluted way of saying "prove me guilty" to the courts.
I know it's splitting hairs, but as I understand it, you're perfectly OK to combine GPL and non-GPL software any way you like (at least, the GPL does not prohibit this) - however you are not allowed to then distribute it.
While what you say is true, GPLv3 modifies the term "distribute" to "convey," and then defines "convey" after a fashion remarkably departing from the previous definition of "distribute". While I like this shift, and find it one of the most notable things about the GPLv3, the change is not insignificant. They're sharpening their knives over a the FSF. I hope people change to the GPLv3. It's good.
The only thing is, that when we are hiring for a super-duper-senior level developer and they have more than 8 years experience, I expect them to know *something*.
Ask them what they're best at. Then ask them to back that up.
Here's a little trick I used to like:
Put them in front of a keyboard. Ask them what they're favorite editor is. If you don't have it, make them install it. Watch how that goes. Then ask them to make some easy code changes. Work with them collaboratively, you know, like a buddy. While watching all this, note how well they work with their editor. Very few very good programmers are very bad with their editor.
You'd be suprised how many people have been doing distributed processing and yet they design their remote objects to be as chatty as possible.
Ha. No I wouldn't!:)
But to your larger point, interviewing is a delicate skills well-honed over time, after finding more of the wrong than the right employees.
I'll tell you, I just don't know what the right way to interview people is. My technique these days is "attempt to turn over interesting stones." I make my interview kind of like a techie jam session, and see how well they jam. I ask them if they read slashdot. No? Hmmm. Bad sign.
I'm serious about that, too. What serious geek doesn't know about slash?
The only thing that's ever been consistently successful for me is turning up gems on the interview. Alas, there are a lot of people who have no gems that I can find... let's call them "just a programmers" if you get what I mean... and I'm sure that plenty of them are fine engineers to employ in a larger organization.
The one thing that I have found to be a consistently bad indicator is a long list of classes on the resume. These people are always people who need classes, i.e., are not the type of people to pick up new technology on their own, through the love of it.
This last observation is more specific to my specialty: I work in research, and I know that this last type of person just won't work out in research, except as low man on the totem... not particularly in their best interests to hire them at all, unless you have some other reason that makes you like them.
Which brings me to a last and final item. Those geek jam sessions? Well, see, geeks who like to jam... they do well in research settings. Kind of sort of social test.:)
Your conclusions were not reasonable: they were biased, self serving, and insulting. You made comments that were both directed at me personally and demeaning to me personally, and did it intentionally. What's worse, you had the gall to then complain about my complaint about it.
On that note, I have another thing for you to contemplate: "those in glass houses should not throw stones."
If you want to get pedantic, you can only read one or two *words* at a time. For all practical purposes, though, that is not the case. Eye movement takes orders of magnitude less time and attention than screen flipping.
What screen flipper have you been using? Mine is instant, activated strictly with keystrokes that reside under commonly used fingers. One benefit of having a screen flipper is that I can have email and correspondence tools all up and running on one window, documentation of various forms on another, runtime server logs and so forth on a third, code work on the forth. If all you are doing is organizing windows on one screen, I suspect that you are behind me in your personal workflow efficiency.
Taking more than 80 columns is a good indicator that you're either using a poorly thought out coding standard, or writing poorly thought out code.
I find the idea that the use of white space is negatively correlated with "well thought out code" to be extremely dubious.
That you don't see much use for viewing multiple files at once proves you're not doing anything all that complicated. Still a student?
I do find it amusing that you are arguing argumentum ad antiquitatem. Have you considered that the more youthful generation of computer scientists will likely be taking 1600x1200 monitors for granted, and that your assumptions on screen constraints might not be anywhere near valid as you think? I have an 1880x1440 monitor at home, and a 1920x1280 one at work. If I were so inclined, I could fit several 80 column windows side by side. I elect to code more near the 120 character boundary now, and have no troubles whatsoever. That old 80 column rule was designed for postage stamp sized monitors.
Anyway, that's the second time now that you've attempted to turn the discussion from one regarding the subject matter to one regarding a party to the discussion. It's terribly rude, and doesn't say particularly flattering things for your ability to either present your point of view or conduct yourself civilly. Suggest you contemplate that for a while; had this been an in-person discussion, you would have just embarrassed yourself terribly.
When the definition itself of a thing is called into question, one cannot appeal to the original definition. It's a form of circular logic.
If you can't read multiple panes at once, well... you're in the wrong industry.
What you've just described is biologically impossible. YOU cant read multiple panes at once. No human can. What humans can do is switch back and forth between panes, attending to one, then the other. There are many ways of achieving this; screen flipping, I find to be a better way. To put two panes side by side only rarely has use to me.
C//
Re:Because you don't know what monitor will be use
on
Are 80 Columns Enough?
·
· Score: 1
Define "productive". I find neat code productive. I can't two pages of code at once (side by side), I can only read one page at a time. I can flip a window to read the second page in the time it takes you to turn your head.
I would suggest that when you are writing code that is in excess of 80 columns you might be trying to do too much in one line.
That depends. For example, the liberty of a very wide monitor allows you to start doing anal things like lining up the regular aspects of lines into vertical lines, ala something not unlike excel. There is also all that free area to the right, where you can do very large amounts of documentation. Who's to say documentation should be vertical? That's a bias coming from our ancestors, who had teeny monitors.
I view it as quite likely that if the government price fixes physician wages, they'll generate a artificial scarcity in the system. In fact, this sort of meddling would create all sorts of pertubations, none of them really desirable.
You can't really *plan* in advance for such meddling. What do you do with all the physicians who are currently earning the high pay that they worked and plan for over the significant portions of their lives? Suddenly cutting their pay by legislative fiat is terribly confiscatory, and socially capricious.
Don't get me wrong. Because of the current state of affairs (we *DO* have socialized health care, it's just hidden under the umbrella of forced admissions umbrellas at hospitals), I see no alternative but to build some kind of medical system for those without.
Consider this from another point of view: I don't like federal income tax. Why? Because it creates a relatively homogenous competitive domain between the States. If the tax situation were inverted (States had the high income tax, Feds had the low), then States that made mutations would be much more likely to bear the burden of their economic systems. I.e., if Nevada elected do drop it's State income tax from a 28-XX% bracket to 0%, that would be quite a lot different than dropping from a comparative 8% to 0%.
Ironically, the EU is basically in this boat now. That's why when Ireland revamped its corporate tax system so many corporations headquartered there.
For these reasons and more, I'd be much more in favor of per-state health insurance systems, using the Fed as an aggregation point for negotiation or some such.
While the belief that the freedom the bear arms was restricted to only the militia is popular in the modern era, such a belief is inconsistent with the first one hundred and fifty years of interpretation of this amendment. Argumentum ad Antiquitatem may be a crock, but sometimes does form a valid argument. Consider it.
This is forgetting the stickly little detail that when this Amendment was passed, the "militia" consistent of every adult male citizen in the US over the age of 18.
Of course, the person you were responding to is a dunderhead. The true management instrument is the First Amendment. Alas, if Americans can't be bothered to use that, I can't really see how they're likely to be deserving very much of the Second.
Hmmmm. I can imagine I was mistaken. I was once told that unpaid utility bills don't enter into your credit score. Was that technically correct... i.e., no score change, but annotation made?
The two last companies I've worked at have had these series of 1 hour meetings, each dedicated to a pattern. I've never been able to stand the things. One can comprehend what even a complex pattern is in a few minutes, with minimal review of the code and a discussion of its purpose. Is "bored with material that is obvious," a job qualification at your company?
Anyway. Okay, so a sore point, and I'm jaded.
Be that as it may, unless you are doing something terribly wrong, it's unlikely that a huge portion of the software folks coming to your company are utterly incompetent. Your OP made it sound as if they all were. Or was that just me? I suppose it's possible that they were based on some kind of selection bias, but I find it unlikely, ergo my comment on needing to work harder to ellicit candidate strengths. But then I think you agreed with me, after a fashion: "those were actually before I truly understood how to get at the heart of people's abilities."
I'm glad to hear it. Understand, I used to be a real hard ass interviewer when I was younger at the top of my software abilities, "having little tolerance for fools." So if I've sounded a bit harsh, just consider the old saying "we condemn first what we see in ourselves."
On an amusing note, we were doing this team interview where a senior developer asked the interviewee all these java SOA web this and that questions, with the candiddate being somewhat so-so in the answers. The fun part was my turn. I started poking around in the personal life: "so, do you write code when you're not at work?" And so forth. All the answers turned the candidate into a stellar class A.
Doesn't happen all that often, of course (passion sadly lacking in my industry... defense software) but you can be surprised at what you find if you try to turn over stones... particularly with the (sometimes still passionate) younger ones.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because to get a patent you have to prove the technique hasn't been previously published by someone else.
Where'd you get a crazy idea like that?
C//
Failure to accept this is only going to widen the gulf, unless MS, through largesse or coincidence follows the new standard.
Ha. They're already "standard," as you pointed out. The symptomology you're referring to exists in every industry where there is a giant and a bunch of competitors collectively represent a minority part of the market. Only the competitors benefit from an "open standard," as the market leader has already set their own standard.
C//
If this had been proven during his lifetime, it may or may not have shaken his personal faith in God.
To say that Einstein had much of a personal faith in "God" in the first place is a terrible misrepresentation.
C//
This is true. But then, that's always the way it's been: the less financially capable states benefit asymmetrically well under the Feds. Same is true for other things as well: they get disproportionately more defense per dollar of investment, and so on. No real surprise here, right?
C//
Where in the Constitution does it give the federal government the authority to construct such a bridge in just Alaska?
Authority to both tax and spend is in the Constitution.
Insofar as we continue to have federal taxes, the People of Alaska are well within their rights to expect value back for them. Yes, the tax system is probably inverted. Yes, if we are to have taxes as high as they are, it should be the States with the high taxes and the Feds with the low. That's not how it is, though, so in this particular case, Alaskans pushing for Federal money is perfectly ethical.
C//
Because they are specifically looking for a liquid fuel that can be used in internal combustion motors.
I know, I know, you're thinking: electric cards, electric semitrucks, electric tractors, electric everything. Well it's not so easy.
Liquid fuel appears to be a better energy sink than batteries at the moment by a long shot.
C//
Avoid information degrees like the plague...
I would agree, based on a general principle. As a young person, when in doubt, take the harder path. The harder degree opens more doors, and when you are young, opening doors is why you are getting your quals, even when you don't know what you want to do exactly. As other posters in this thread have stated, there is no job for which an IT degree qualifies you that a CS degree does not qualify you better. Go for the CS degree. A little bit of a side note: like the person I am responding to stated, some CS degrees are now programming degrees. Some are more mathy and theoretical. If you believe that you can tolerate the math and theory, go for it. If not, either pick a software engineering major or make sure the CS degree you are going for is in line with your plans for four-to-five years of your life.
The IT degree is meaningless. I can only see a couple of valid reasons to get an IT degree. 1) you believe you can't cut the harder degree, or 2) you are doing something like an IT-MBA combo or IT-law combo (such as for intellectual property attorney), where the IT is more a quick way to become generally aware of but not particularly strong in technology.
C//
Well; I could believe that the law says what the law says. But the difference between physical keys and encryption keys is that with the latter, one must *literally* testify in order to divulge them. This requires written or verbal testimony, which would superficially seem to me to be what the 5th prohibits. Anyway, I am skeptical that they "treat it like evidence had been found," but I could believe that they might find one in contempt.
Back to your physical lock example (and disregarding how the law or courts actually work), if one were to suppose that the door were locked with a combination lock, demanding the combination from the suspect would likewise seem to me to be spiritually against the purpose of the 5th. By all means, with warrant issued cut the lock off, but don't demand that the suspect facilitate in implicating his own guilt!
C//
OK, first, DRM is not the law.
I suggest you read this carefully:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA
"It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that are used to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as DRM) and criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, even when there is no infringement of copyright itself."
Sadly, at least here in the Unfree States of America, DRM **is** most assuredly the law.
C//
Civil discovery is a very frightening process: you can be compelled (under pain of contempt punishments) to produce anything the opposing lawyers ask for that is remotely relevant (might lead to evidence). Encryption is useless, you have to produce plaintext.
True. And if you are later somehow discovered to have not divulged the relevant material in a True Crypt hidden volume, both heaping civil penalties as well as probable criminal ones would apply. This is unlike a criminal case, where witholding evidence that could implicate you in a crime is definitionally legal, along with lying about your innocence, which is just considered a convoluted way of saying "prove me guilty" to the courts.
C//
While they will not be able to prove they contain the suspect data, plausible deniability becomes less plausible.
If this were a criminal case, wouldn't one invoke the 5th Amendment? Sorry charley, no keys forthcoming?
C//
I know it's splitting hairs, but as I understand it, you're perfectly OK to combine GPL and non-GPL software any way you like (at least, the GPL does not prohibit this) - however you are not allowed to then distribute it.
While what you say is true, GPLv3 modifies the term "distribute" to "convey," and then defines "convey" after a fashion remarkably departing from the previous definition of "distribute". While I like this shift, and find it one of the most notable things about the GPLv3, the change is not insignificant. They're sharpening their knives over a the FSF. I hope people change to the GPLv3. It's good.
C//
The only thing is, that when we are hiring for a super-duper-senior level developer and they have more than 8 years experience, I expect them to know *something*.
Ask them what they're best at. Then ask them to back that up.
Here's a little trick I used to like:
Put them in front of a keyboard. Ask them what they're favorite editor is. If you don't have it, make them install it. Watch how that goes. Then ask them to make some easy code changes. Work with them collaboratively, you know, like a buddy. While watching all this, note how well they work with their editor. Very few very good programmers are very bad with their editor.
You'd be suprised how many people have been doing distributed processing and yet they design their remote objects to be as chatty as possible.
Ha. No I wouldn't!
But to your larger point, interviewing is a delicate skills well-honed over time, after finding more of the wrong than the right employees.
I'll tell you, I just don't know what the right way to interview people is. My technique these days is "attempt to turn over interesting stones." I make my interview kind of like a techie jam session, and see how well they jam. I ask them if they read slashdot. No? Hmmm. Bad sign.
I'm serious about that, too. What serious geek doesn't know about slash?
The only thing that's ever been consistently successful for me is turning up gems on the interview. Alas, there are a lot of people who have no gems that I can find... let's call them "just a programmers" if you get what I mean... and I'm sure that plenty of them are fine engineers to employ in a larger organization.
The one thing that I have found to be a consistently bad indicator is a long list of classes on the resume. These people are always people who need classes, i.e., are not the type of people to pick up new technology on their own, through the love of it.
This last observation is more specific to my specialty: I work in research, and I know that this last type of person just won't work out in research, except as low man on the totem... not particularly in their best interests to hire them at all, unless you have some other reason that makes you like them.
Which brings me to a last and final item. Those geek jam sessions? Well, see, geeks who like to jam... they do well in research settings. Kind of sort of social test.
C//
You could just be an idiot.
These were your true colors all along, bud.
C//
Your conclusions were not reasonable: they were biased, self serving, and insulting. You made comments that were both directed at me personally and demeaning to me personally, and did it intentionally. What's worse, you had the gall to then complain about my complaint about it.
On that note, I have another thing for you to contemplate: "those in glass houses should not throw stones."
C//
Says the person who attempted two personal attacks.
If you want to get pedantic, you can only read one or two *words* at a time. For all practical purposes, though, that is not the case. Eye movement takes orders of magnitude less time and attention than screen flipping.
What screen flipper have you been using? Mine is instant, activated strictly with keystrokes that reside under commonly used fingers. One benefit of having a screen flipper is that I can have email and correspondence tools all up and running on one window, documentation of various forms on another, runtime server logs and so forth on a third, code work on the forth. If all you are doing is organizing windows on one screen, I suspect that you are behind me in your personal workflow efficiency.
Taking more than 80 columns is a good indicator that you're either using a poorly thought out coding standard, or writing poorly thought out code.
I find the idea that the use of white space is negatively correlated with "well thought out code" to be extremely dubious.
That you don't see much use for viewing multiple files at once proves you're not doing anything all that complicated. Still a student?
I do find it amusing that you are arguing argumentum ad antiquitatem. Have you considered that the more youthful generation of computer scientists will likely be taking 1600x1200 monitors for granted, and that your assumptions on screen constraints might not be anywhere near valid as you think? I have an 1880x1440 monitor at home, and a 1920x1280 one at work. If I were so inclined, I could fit several 80 column windows side by side. I elect to code more near the 120 character boundary now, and have no troubles whatsoever. That old 80 column rule was designed for postage stamp sized monitors.
Anyway, that's the second time now that you've attempted to turn the discussion from one regarding the subject matter to one regarding a party to the discussion. It's terribly rude, and doesn't say particularly flattering things for your ability to either present your point of view or conduct yourself civilly. Suggest you contemplate that for a while; had this been an in-person discussion, you would have just embarrassed yourself terribly.
C//
Neat code, by definition, fits within 80 columns.
*chortle*
When the definition itself of a thing is called into question, one cannot appeal to the original definition. It's a form of circular logic.
If you can't read multiple panes at once, well... you're in the wrong industry.
What you've just described is biologically impossible. YOU cant read multiple panes at once. No human can. What humans can do is switch back and forth between panes, attending to one, then the other. There are many ways of achieving this; screen flipping, I find to be a better way. To put two panes side by side only rarely has use to me.
C//
Define "productive". I find neat code productive. I can't two pages of code at once (side by side), I can only read one page at a time. I can flip a window to read the second page in the time it takes you to turn your head.
C//
I would suggest that when you are writing code that is in excess of 80 columns you might be trying to do too much in one line.
That depends. For example, the liberty of a very wide monitor allows you to start doing anal things like lining up the regular aspects of lines into vertical lines, ala something not unlike excel. There is also all that free area to the right, where you can do very large amounts of documentation. Who's to say documentation should be vertical? That's a bias coming from our ancestors, who had teeny monitors.
C//
I view it as quite likely that if the government price fixes physician wages, they'll generate a artificial scarcity in the system. In fact, this sort of meddling would create all sorts of pertubations, none of them really desirable.
You can't really *plan* in advance for such meddling. What do you do with all the physicians who are currently earning the high pay that they worked and plan for over the significant portions of their lives? Suddenly cutting their pay by legislative fiat is terribly confiscatory, and socially capricious.
Don't get me wrong. Because of the current state of affairs (we *DO* have socialized health care, it's just hidden under the umbrella of forced admissions umbrellas at hospitals), I see no alternative but to build some kind of medical system for those without.
Consider this from another point of view: I don't like federal income tax. Why? Because it creates a relatively homogenous competitive domain between the States. If the tax situation were inverted (States had the high income tax, Feds had the low), then States that made mutations would be much more likely to bear the burden of their economic systems. I.e., if Nevada elected do drop it's State income tax from a 28-XX% bracket to 0%, that would be quite a lot different than dropping from a comparative 8% to 0%.
Ironically, the EU is basically in this boat now. That's why when Ireland revamped its corporate tax system so many corporations headquartered there.
For these reasons and more, I'd be much more in favor of per-state health insurance systems, using the Fed as an aggregation point for negotiation or some such.
C//
While the belief that the freedom the bear arms was restricted to only the militia is popular in the modern era, such a belief is inconsistent with the first one hundred and fifty years of interpretation of this amendment. Argumentum ad Antiquitatem may be a crock, but sometimes does form a valid argument. Consider it.
This is forgetting the stickly little detail that when this Amendment was passed, the "militia" consistent of every adult male citizen in the US over the age of 18.
Of course, the person you were responding to is a dunderhead. The true management instrument is the First Amendment. Alas, if Americans can't be bothered to use that, I can't really see how they're likely to be deserving very much of the Second.
C//
Hmmmm. I can imagine I was mistaken. I was once told that unpaid utility bills don't enter into your credit score. Was that technically correct... i.e., no score change, but annotation made?
C//
They just flat expect that I will eventually pay to avoid the mark on my credit.
Little known secret: your account ain't credit, and they can't mark your credit score.
C//
The two last companies I've worked at have had these series of 1 hour meetings, each dedicated to a pattern. I've never been able to stand the things. One can comprehend what even a complex pattern is in a few minutes, with minimal review of the code and a discussion of its purpose. Is "bored with material that is obvious," a job qualification at your company?
Anyway. Okay, so a sore point, and I'm jaded.
Be that as it may, unless you are doing something terribly wrong, it's unlikely that a huge portion of the software folks coming to your company are utterly incompetent. Your OP made it sound as if they all were. Or was that just me? I suppose it's possible that they were based on some kind of selection bias, but I find it unlikely, ergo my comment on needing to work harder to ellicit candidate strengths. But then I think you agreed with me, after a fashion: "those were actually before I truly understood how to get at the heart of people's abilities."
I'm glad to hear it. Understand, I used to be a real hard ass interviewer when I was younger at the top of my software abilities, "having little tolerance for fools." So if I've sounded a bit harsh, just consider the old saying "we condemn first what we see in ourselves."
On an amusing note, we were doing this team interview where a senior developer asked the interviewee all these java SOA web this and that questions, with the candiddate being somewhat so-so in the answers. The fun part was my turn. I started poking around in the personal life: "so, do you write code when you're not at work?" And so forth. All the answers turned the candidate into a stellar class A.
Doesn't happen all that often, of course (passion sadly lacking in my industry... defense software) but you can be surprised at what you find if you try to turn over stones... particularly with the (sometimes still passionate) younger ones.
Regards,
C//