In addition, I'm constantly getting email from the banks (Citibank and Wells Fargo both do this) that has some special offer or some such. Banks need to stop sending spam and tell their customers "You will NOT get email from us. Any email that claims to be from us is a fraud."
This really underscores Schneier's point - as long as the banks aren't taking financial hits for their bad security practices they'll continue doing it. Their spam makes some kind of a profit for them and they don't get hit with the downside of phishing attacks based on their spam.
Copyright isn't weakened if you don't take action against someone violating it. Trademarks need to be defended in order to be retained but copyrights do not.
You mean: As a niche player, AMD doesn't have the resource to support Apple in this way. If AMD had landed Apple they would be their largest account by far.
Hey, I had a ton of stuff written in Dylan! And a big OpenDoc application too! And I've still got to port my accounting system off of Applesoft Basic (hey, wait, didn't Microsoft have their fingers in that one too?)
I remember seeing this thing at the West Coast Computer Fair back in the 80's. That used to be so much fun. Always something new. Often stupid, but always new.
CS theory is only useful after you've spent enough time in the "real world" to understand that CS theory isn't everything.
Very true. Either be prepared on graduating to pay your dues for a while or try to get an internship/job while you're in school to give you some real experience. However, beware the lure of the job market. I was having a lot more fun playing with the toys we were building than going to classes. At one point they asked me to dropout and go full-time. I declined, but eventually wound up being a part-time student and full time worker. A while later they hired someone fresh out of college but very bright. One day we got to comparing salaries and I discovered that she was getting about 30% more than I was. I took this to my boss and the reply was "She has a college degree and you don't" Grrrr....Gave me a lot of incentive to finish off the degree.
Here's what languages you should learn in school: one procedural language (like C), one OO language (like C++ or Java), and one assembly language (like MIPS). Once you learn any of those, the rest are just variations on a theme.
I would add LISP (since you can do wonderful and strange things in it) and Prolog since the whole basic concept of how it works is just different. You may never use them again but you should have tried them at least once.
Well, get yourself a degree from a diploma mill or night school or some such. For the most part it doesn't matter that your degree isn't in CS if you have experience in the industry.
If you want to spend your life maintaining dusty deck code on some mainframe, learn to be a coder. If you want to build products and make things, get an engineering degree.
My Computer Science department (UCSD - this was in the late '80s) didn't offer ANY language courses . We were expected to learn assembler, Pascal, C, C++, LISP, and whatever else we needed for the courses we were taking as a part of taking the course. Most of our classes involved a lot of coding.
You will NOT pick up the theory side without a lot of work. Basic data structures, perhaps, but combinatorics takes some work. Language design, compiler design, etc. are non-trivial.
Pascal is mostly a dead language now. The assembler we learned (PDP-11) is dead. Out of Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP at least one will be a dead language in 15 years. Don't waste your time in college on learning languages. Instead, learn how to learn new languages and new things.
I finished a CS degree back in 1991 while working as a kernel developer (this is pre-Linux. I worked at a minisupercomputer manufacturer with a professional development team and the guys who designed the processor and other hardware). As a result when I finished college (after many years) I had a firm grounding in CS theory, a pretty solid knowledge of hardware and techniques, a lot of knowledge about 4.2 BSD internals and a lot of good knowledge about how to turn out software in a team environment.
After 14 years, what can I still use from 1991?
CS Theory - still the same baby. I don't pull it out often but when you need it, you've gotta know it. How to work in a team/ship software Basic computer design/electronics
The other stuff is just technology. It comes and it goes. Every piece of hardware that I knew well from 1991 is obsolete. I can still solder but surface mount is damned hard to do by hand. 4.3 BSD internals? Not super useful.
When I was in school I had similar complaints to yours. I hung in and finished my degree because I didn't want to spend the rest of my career explaining why I didn't have a degree. Now, I'm really glad I did. The longer you stay in the industry the more you will appreciate the theory side of things. It's really a whole different thing from learning technology and it has much longer term value.
Sometimes FEWER features makes for a better program. Until you get something from some PHB who just had to use some obscure feature that you can't import.
As you speed up you will experience time dilation (that is time will slow for you) and you will contract along the axis of travel such that a photon will always appear to be moving at 186,000 m/s relative to you.
The famous Michelson-Morley experiment measured the speed of light at right angles. The expected result was that light on one axis would seem to be going slower since the Earth is moving quite rapidly. Instead, they could not measure any difference. This led to Einstein's theory of relativity.
Companies that make a product you will never need another of go out of business.
Oh, but the wonderful thing about the software industry is that software goes bad. All you need is a few revs of the OS and pretty soon you need to have the latest version.
Well, then if it is truly is impossible you wind up buying the GPS hardware and installing all that stuff. Odds are though that when the costs make their way up the management chain, "impossible" becomes "yes sir, I'll stop being a butthead"
Subversion is an open source source code management tool. It's distributed under the BSD license, I think. It has nothing to do with BitKeeper or the Linux kernel source code management debacle.
16 bits * 3600 secs/hr = 57600 bits or 5760 bytes (I usually divide bps by 10 to get bytes because of things like parity and other protocol overhead) 5760 bytes/hr * 24 hr = 195840 bytes/day 195840bytes/day * 365 days/year = 71481600 bytes/year 71 MB/year * 40 = 2840 MB
Still a trivial amount by today's standards but I think you need to check those flashing fingers of yours on the calculator.
the uro-genital area? I've seen the "skinsuit" pop up in science fiction on a regular basis and I've looked at the scientific papers but I've never seen anything addressing that. On men the penis and scrotum are a complex shape that would be hard to cover with skin tight fabric. For women the area under the breasts might be a little hard to fill in. For both sexes the anus is problematic. Oh, and the skin suit design assumes that the wearer is not obese.
One could imagine a hard suit area that goes around the uro-genital area but this would need three gaskets and the abdomen tends to flex in and out quite a bit which could make that interface tricky.
Guess what - many (most?) other countries don't play daylight savings games. I'm living in Japan right now (I'm an American) and I truly do not miss it at all. Japan had DST during the occupation and the first thing they did after MacArthur left was chuck it.
I'd be interested in hearing from an actual developer who *is* impacted by this.
I am. We ship a commercial app for OS X which is Java/Cocoa. We wanted to have a good, native look and feel so we isolated the UI specific portions using a Model-View-Controller setup and have it running ontop of Cocoa and Swing. Swing does not provide a good enough Mac experience for a commercial app and SWT is not quite right either (the menu bar tends to go wonky, there's no support for sheets...)
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In addition, I'm constantly getting email from the banks (Citibank and Wells Fargo both do this) that has some special offer or some such. Banks need to stop sending spam and tell their customers "You will NOT get email from us. Any email that claims to be from us is a fraud."
This really underscores Schneier's point - as long as the banks aren't taking financial hits for their bad security practices they'll continue doing it. Their spam makes some kind of a profit for them and they don't get hit with the downside of phishing attacks based on their spam.
Copyright isn't weakened if you don't take action against someone violating it. Trademarks need to be defended in order to be retained but copyrights do not.
You mean: As a niche player, AMD doesn't have the resource to support Apple in this way. If AMD had landed Apple they would be their largest account by far.
Hey, I had a ton of stuff written in Dylan! And a big OpenDoc application too! And I've still got to port my accounting system off of Applesoft Basic (hey, wait, didn't Microsoft have their fingers in that one too?)
You mean the "Stringy Floppy" ?
I remember seeing this thing at the West Coast Computer Fair back in the 80's. That used to be so much fun. Always something new. Often stupid, but always new.
CS theory is only useful after you've spent enough time in the "real world" to understand that CS theory isn't everything.
Very true. Either be prepared on graduating to pay your dues for a while or try to get an internship/job while you're in school to give you some real experience. However, beware the lure of the job market. I was having a lot more fun playing with the toys we were building than going to classes. At one point they asked me to dropout and go full-time. I declined, but eventually wound up being a part-time student and full time worker. A while later they hired someone fresh out of college but very bright. One day we got to comparing salaries and I discovered that she was getting about 30% more than I was. I took this to my boss and the reply was "She has a college degree and you don't" Grrrr....Gave me a lot of incentive to finish off the degree.
Here's what languages you should learn in school: one procedural language (like C), one OO language (like C++ or Java), and one assembly language (like MIPS). Once you learn any of those, the rest are just variations on a theme.
I would add LISP (since you can do wonderful and strange things in it) and Prolog since the whole basic concept of how it works is just different. You may never use them again but you should have tried them at least once.
Well, get yourself a degree from a diploma mill or night school or some such. For the most part it doesn't matter that your degree isn't in CS if you have experience in the industry.
If you want to spend your life maintaining dusty deck code on some mainframe, learn to be a coder. If you want to build products and make things, get an engineering degree.
My Computer Science department (UCSD - this was in the late '80s) didn't offer ANY language courses . We were expected to learn assembler, Pascal, C, C++, LISP, and whatever else we needed for the courses we were taking as a part of taking the course. Most of our classes involved a lot of coding.
You will NOT pick up the theory side without a lot of work. Basic data structures, perhaps, but combinatorics takes some work. Language design, compiler design, etc. are non-trivial.
Pascal is mostly a dead language now. The assembler we learned (PDP-11) is dead. Out of Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP at least one will be a dead language in 15 years. Don't waste your time in college on learning languages. Instead, learn how to learn new languages and new things.
This has always been true. However...
I finished a CS degree back in 1991 while working as a kernel developer (this is pre-Linux. I worked at a minisupercomputer manufacturer with a professional development team and the guys who designed the processor and other hardware). As a result when I finished college (after many years) I had a firm grounding in CS theory, a pretty solid knowledge of hardware and techniques, a lot of knowledge about 4.2 BSD internals and a lot of good knowledge about how to turn out software in a team environment.
After 14 years, what can I still use from 1991?
CS Theory - still the same baby. I don't pull it out often but when you need it, you've gotta know it.
How to work in a team/ship software
Basic computer design/electronics
The other stuff is just technology. It comes and it goes. Every piece of hardware that I knew well from 1991 is obsolete. I can still solder but surface mount is damned hard to do by hand. 4.3 BSD internals? Not super useful.
When I was in school I had similar complaints to yours. I hung in and finished my degree because I didn't want to spend the rest of my career explaining why I didn't have a degree. Now, I'm really glad I did. The longer you stay in the industry the more you will appreciate the theory side of things. It's really a whole different thing from learning technology and it has much longer term value.
Sometimes FEWER features makes for a better program. Until you get something from some PHB who just had to use some obscure feature that you can't import.
As you speed up you will experience time dilation (that is time will slow for you) and you will contract along the axis of travel such that a photon will always appear to be moving at 186,000 m/s relative to you.
The famous Michelson-Morley experiment measured the speed of light at right angles. The expected result was that light on one axis would seem to be going slower since the Earth is moving quite rapidly. Instead, they could not measure any difference. This led to Einstein's theory of relativity.
Huh? What comment are you replying to?
Companies that make a product you will never need another of go out of business.
Oh, but the wonderful thing about the software industry is that software goes bad. All you need is a few revs of the OS and pretty soon you need to have the latest version.
Well, then if it is truly is impossible you wind up buying the GPS hardware and installing all that stuff. Odds are though that when the costs make their way up the management chain, "impossible" becomes "yes sir, I'll stop being a butthead"
Boy, you are just really bitter about the BitKeeper thing aren't you? This isn't BitKeeper and it doesn't have anything to do with those guys.
Subversion is an open source source code management tool. It's distributed under the BSD license, I think. It has nothing to do with BitKeeper or the Linux kernel source code management debacle.
Quick but wrong.
16 bits * 3600 secs/hr = 57600 bits or 5760 bytes (I usually divide bps by 10 to get bytes because of things like parity and other protocol overhead)
5760 bytes/hr * 24 hr = 195840 bytes/day
195840bytes/day * 365 days/year = 71481600 bytes/year
71 MB/year * 40 = 2840 MB
Still a trivial amount by today's standards but I think you need to check those flashing fingers of yours on the calculator.
the uro-genital area? I've seen the "skinsuit" pop up in science fiction on a regular basis and I've looked at the scientific papers but I've never seen anything addressing that. On men the penis and scrotum are a complex shape that would be hard to cover with skin tight fabric. For women the area under the breasts might be a little hard to fill in. For both sexes the anus is problematic. Oh, and the skin suit design assumes that the wearer is not obese.
One could imagine a hard suit area that goes around the uro-genital area but this would need three gaskets and the abdomen tends to flex in and out quite a bit which could make that interface tricky.
How about if someone just hands them a pen drive and says "Double-click on the Readme.exe file"? Seems like a lot less work to me.
Guess what - many (most?) other countries don't play daylight savings games. I'm living in Japan right now (I'm an American) and I truly do not miss it at all. Japan had DST during the occupation and the first thing they did after MacArthur left was chuck it.
Which is why you should never RTFA!
Good one - I almost spewed Coke across my nice shiny new white iBook.
I'd be interested in hearing from an actual developer who *is* impacted by this.
I am. We ship a commercial app for OS X which is Java/Cocoa. We wanted to have a good, native look and feel so we isolated the UI specific portions using a Model-View-Controller setup and have it running ontop of Cocoa and Swing. Swing does not provide a good enough Mac experience for a commercial app and SWT is not quite right either (the menu bar tends to go wonky, there's no support for sheets...)